• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here
  • From now on we will require that a prefix is set for any items in the sales area. We have created regions and locations for this. We also require that you select a delivery option before posting your listing. This will hopefully help us streamline the things that get listed for sales here and help local people better advertise their items, especially for local only sales. New sales rules are also coming, so stay tuned.

Any early Dell collectors out there

Chuck(G)

Chuck(G)

25k Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2007
Messages
44,612
Location
Pacific Northwest, USA
I'd like to get a snapshot of the Dell 286 BIOS with the Faraday motherboard in it. I can send you a DOS program to snapshot it, so you don't even need to crack the case.

Just filling out a few odds and ends here.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Yup, PCs Limited, although I don't know when the Faraday board was used in relation to the name change. At any rate, it's this one. I need the BIOS image.

Kudos to Dell for trying to keep complete information around on everything they sold.
Click to expand...

Looks like PC's Limited released that machine, PDF here

Still chasing that BIOS <g> been in the gutters and swamps rooting around. It's kind of like Sasquatch.
 
I'm not sure that that's the one. The "A Tease" mobo system had fixed top speed of 6MHz, while the brochure says "speeds to 12MHz". The "A Tease" is a full-sized AT motherboard with serial and parallel. One interesting aspect is that it has jumpers for putting the serial ports on RS-422 level transceivers.

My first 286 was a Faraday "A Tease" motherboard, I think I bought it at Haltek in Mountain View. I was never able to get more than 8MHz out of it. I still have a board, but not the original one I had. I'd love to find the BIOS for it.
 
Without a better picture I was taking a shot. It has the same slot configuration as the IBM A/T 5170, I believe there were more than one PC's Limited 286 motherboards and the brochure blankets different systems. When I looked up the PC's Limited 286

on the Dell website it gave me a completely different main board than what is described in the brochure. Thought mayhaps the flashy LED lights on the front of the case was unique to that motherboard but maybe not. I'm certain there are copies of the BIOS

somewhere....
 
I've got an Osicom Executive 286 with a Faraday chipset. It's got EGA, HD/FD, Serial/Parallel all on the board. The only card in it is a modem.
 
No display stuff on this motherboard. One interesting feature is that it has its own debug display--a DIP package with 8 LEDs that displays POST codes. AFAIK, this was the first board where Faraday actually made a chipset for a PC and it's pretty primitive. The board contains all the usual ICs, 8259s, 8237s, 16450s, etc., so there's not a lot of integration. The 80286 is a ceramic LCC, so it's pretty early. I even have the schematics for the board. What I need is an image of the BIOS...
 
I could dig my own up, but this is just as easy and it works. Go here and download the BIOSDUMP archive. From a DOS prompt, run the unpacked file BIOSDUMP--it's just a DEBUG script (so it will run on any version of MSDOS) that creates a file called BIOSDUMP.BIN. That's the file that contains the contents of the last 64KB of memory and the image of the system BIOS.

Thanks!
 
Sorry for the delay. Kids Birthday at Chuck E. Cheese's on Sunday and Cub Scouts on Monday.

I've attached the BIOS file as well as the VGA card BIOS since its fairly early if anyone is interested. I've also attached a (fuzzy) picture of the mainboard and the PC for identification.

I had to wrap the .BIN file in a .ZIP since the forum software frowns on that particular extension, but there is no compression.
 

Attachments

  • Dell System 200 BIOS A07.ZIP
    64.1 KB · Views: 1
  • ATI VGA Integra 512k BIOS.ZIP
    64.1 KB · Views: 1
  • HPIM1230.jpg
    HPIM1230.jpg
    85.1 KB · Views: 1
  • HPIM1224.jpg
    HPIM1224.jpg
    89.8 KB · Views: 1
Thanks Doug, I'll get these burned in the next couple of weeks and see if they do the trick.

I'm not optimistic, however, as the A Tease board is huge and too early to use SIMMs for memory (I think it dates from 1986).
 
In the Don Maslin Archive there is a bios for a faraday 5-slot PC fdaypc17.rom
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top