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386 motherboard with chipset OPTI 82C495XLC BIOS needed

T

Tronix

Experienced Member
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Hello,

Today i found old 386 board based on OPTI 82C495XLC chipset without EEPROM chip. But i found sticker around EEPROM panel:
386 BIOS HI
COPYRIGHT 1984- 90
AWARD SOFTWARE INC
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BIG photo

So, at internet i found two bioses for this chipset:
1) http://chukaev.ru54.com/bios/3opm002.zip - AMI BIOS for 82C495XLC. I born into 27C512 and when MB starting i listen 9 long beeps.
2) http://sannata.ru/bios/386DX/ROM3DX05.RAR - MR.BIOS(AMI?) for 82C495XLC. Starting only with ISA8 video card. If any ISA-16 (trident, realtek) inserted - no signal at monitor.

I am searching for original BIOS for this motherboard...


Thank you.
 
The battery has leaked and corroded a large portion of that board. It's not likely to work no matter what BIOS is in it.
 
Stone said:
The battery has leaked and corroded a large portion of that board.
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You right! I desolder battery, clean all around with C2H5OH then wather, then again C2H5OH and finaly blowdry. ~Five tracks were destroyed by corrosion. I desolder power connector, capacitors, one cache panel and other components for visualy control this tracks. Then I restore this tracks with small wires and solder all components to board. Power on and this motherboard start up with Trident ISA-16 video-card very well. Booted to DOS, start checkit memtest. All tests passed. This board work now with http://sannata.ru/bios/386DX/ROM3DX05.RAR BIOS.

Thank you for answer!
 

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What kind of BIOS staff are these? Some sort of generic BIOS that works with many boards? I'm kind of interested in BIOS for a 386 board myself and wonder if any of those will do
 
Stone said:
The battery has leaked and corroded a large portion of that board. It's not likely to work no matter what BIOS is in it.
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Seems the OP got around the problem. Quite encouraging really for other restorations/repairs folk might like to undertake.
 
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I'd like to have the award bios for opti 495 too. By the way, AMI and MR-BIOS should have a decent chance at working in your board as long as they are written for the opti 495 chipset.
 
Unknown_K said:
Has anybody bothered to dump all the different BIOS for older 286-486 motherboards?
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"Bothered" makes it sound like such a trivial task ... How much effort do you think it would be?

Start with the number of different motherboards for that time period. (1984 to maybe 1995) ? The number of chipsets is less than the number of different motherboards, but you have the additional challenge that these boards have to be in a good running state. And it's not enough to just dump the BIOS - you need a detailed description of each board, pictures, etc.
 
Why do the boards need to be running, figured an eprom programmer could read them (are they copy protected)? TH99 would have the majority of board information and pictures. Sure it is work, but if a few people pitched in for the boards they have it might be manageable.
 
Unknown_K said:
Why do the boards need to be running, figured an eprom programmer could read them (are they copy protected)? TH99 would have the majority of board information and pictures. Sure it is work, but if a few people pitched in for the boards they have it might be manageable.
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The BIOS could be read from a dead board but what if the BIOS is what killed the board? Flawed update or otherwise corrupted. Then everyone who installs that BIOS will have their boards stop working as well.
 
krebizfan said:
The BIOS could be read from a dead board but what if the BIOS is what killed the board? Flawed update or otherwise corrupted. Then everyone who installs that BIOS will have their boards stop working as well.
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I don't know of any BIOS in that era that has a flashable chip. You would need to replace the chip you have with another, leaving the original intact. Sure the copy might be bad, but that is a chance you take doing any swapping.
 
Unknown_K said:
Why do the boards need to be running, figured an eprom programmer could read them (are they copy protected)? TH99 would have the majority of board information and pictures. Sure it is work, but if a few people pitched in for the boards they have it might be manageable.
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I was not expecting an EPROM programmer would be required; the BIOS can generally be dumped by using DEBUG commands. And that requires a running system.

If you want to make an EPROM programmer required, then yes, the boards do not need to be running. But that's a higher hurdle.


Mike
 
mbbrutman said:
I was not expecting an EPROM programmer would be required; the BIOS can generally be dumped by using DEBUG commands. And that requires a running system.

If you want to make an EPROM programmer required, then yes, the boards do not need to be running. But that's a higher hurdle.


Mike
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Ok, how easy would it be to make a DOS batch file to dump the bios on working machines to floppy (would it fit on a 1.44mb bootable DOS disk)? I have quite a few loose motherboards that I could dump easily.
 
Unknown_K said:
Ok, how easy would it be to make a DOS batch file to dump the bios on working machines to floppy (would it fit on a 1.44mb bootable DOS disk)? I have quite a few loose motherboards that I could dump easily.
Click to expand...

I forget the exact debug commands, but it's really just a matter of telling it to take memory starting at a particular location and write it to a file. The same generic technique works for VGA BIOSes, System BIOS, Hard drive adapters BIOSes, PCjr cartridges, etc.

To automate it for PCjr owners I wrote a program: http://www.brutman.com/PCjr/pcjr_cart_dumping.html

That's fairly effective at dumping whatever BIOS ROMs it finds. System ROMs are a little more difficult because the starting location and size can vary. But I'm sure that with a little though somebody could put together a procedure (and a batch file) to auto-detect the start of the System ROM and dump that to a file.


Mike
 
Newer BIOSes, e.g. AWARD Modular BIOS are actually compressed in ROM/Flash, and uncompressed to shadow RAM on boot. So simply dumping memory will not give the original ROM content. But there are utilities that allow reading BIOS in such systems (UniFlash?).
 
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