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Acer J3 Motherboard EISA Config Files

Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward

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I am looking for the EISA config files for the "J3 Project" motherboard used in Acer systems that used dual VLB and EISA bus. These should have been in the Acer Power and Altos lines of computers. I couldn't find these files on the Acer FTP site, as they seemed to have removed everything older than PCI. I did find an EISA config file for the M5 motherboard, which Acer claims works with the J3, but I really have my doubts since it uses a different chipset and has different numbers of EISA slots (in addition to PCI slots).

This was a fairly common motherboard in old Acer systems, so I figure somebody of there must know what I'm talking about.
 
Another name for that board is Acer Altos 7000 or Acerpower 9000.

There is confusion because the J3 board was used in the AcerPower 9000 and Acer Altos 7000.

The M5 board was used in the Acer Altos 9000 and Acer Altos 7000/P and as you noted, has the PCI bus. It seems even Acer got confused.
 
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I don't yet know the name of the CFG file I need (item is still on the way), but I am fairly certain the !ACR1C01.CFG file is not going to work, because that is for a totally different motherboard (which also supports 486 CPUs). Acer just screwed up.

The J3DIAG and J3ECU files are what I need. Sadly, they are nowhere to be found.
 
Something I learned about EISA motherboard files. If the BIOS has settings to enable/disable the onboard peripherals like the serial/parallel ports, you really don't need a fancy CFG file, just one that gives the bare minimum info about the EISA slot configuration. Most of what you see in the M5 file is just placeholder stuff to reserve the resources (mostly IRQs) for the onboard equipment so an auto configure of EISA cards doesn't cause a resource conflict. The CFG file for my Micronics EISA-VL2 board is like this, just tells the tool what EISA slots are available, it doesn't even have the placeholder stuff for the onboard I/O! All that is configured by jumpers on that board.

Older machines from the 386 era tended to use the EISA tool (instead of the BIOS) to configure the on-board stuff which set parameters in CMOS/NVRAM so they had much more elaborate CFG files.
 
Anonymous Coward said:
Agreed. I can probably write my own EISA config file. But it's still best to use the original if I can find it.
Click to expand...

AC,

Have you tried the M5 CFG? If it is just to tell the system how many EISA slots, as noted above, it should work and would be official. I.E. If both systems had three EISA slots in the same position then thats all the CFG file cares about. It really doesn't do anything as far as CPU types and/or ISA/VLB differentiation. I am sure you already have these but I have a guide to EISA CFG format and a program that will autogenerate one if you are interested.

Only issue would be in if they used different OVL files....
 
For anyone who ever needs the files for the J3 motherboard you can get them here:

http://bbs.actapricot.org/files/area41/eisacfg.exe

This is a self extracting executable that contains all the CFG files for the backplane and CPU card.

Thankfully the Acer J3 board was also used in Apricot ePX PC, otherwise this would have been lost forever.

I also have the PDF manual that goes with this system. The only thing I am really missing which I would like is the pinout to the 3rd connector for hooking up the 350W power supply.
 
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