Hi Adrian! This is really a great mainboard and incidentally I'm currently preparing my next video about a similar board. So allow me please to share some thoughts. First of all, yes, most of the PC mainboards don't run without RTC, so it's normal, that this board refused to work without the Dallas module. Then most of 486 don't run with EDO RAM at all and the ones which do run with it, very often end up in very unexpected behavior. So, to make your life easier always test all the 486 mainboards with FPM RAM. I also would suggest to test the 486 boards with the Intel DX2-66 or DX-33 first, since especially Cyrix can make some headaches and can end up in a very strange behavior. I found, that manuals are unfortunately sometimes wrong about it and since Cyrix is not a clone of the Intel CPU, but a complete custom design, some boards seem not to like it. The UUD960520S is the version of the BIOS (May 20th 1996). As far as I found recently, many similar boards with the same chipset existed with different I/O controllers SMCS and UMC and you need the right BIOS to run it properly. And last but not least, did you try the BIOS from the Ultimate Retro project site? There you can find the UUD951108A and may be that one works?
Yea I am kinda not surprised people often try using EDO ram only to run into issues with these boards never mind the boards just being picky as usual. The joys of 90s retro builds.
As someone that did surface mount I saw many problems with that Multi io chip and the capacitor at 10:06. The multi io will need to at least be reflowed because some of the pins may be making contact when you use your probes to check continuity but when the chip is powered on it will heat up even a small amount and that can cause the pins to lift off of solder pads and cause a high resistance. Getting that aligned on the pads will greatly help. Also the capacitor that you showed has a crack in the joint to the left of the component. It will need to be reflowed. It looks like it had partially heated and started to melt when the heat was taken away and it created a cold joint. I used to use side lighting and rotation to help identify cracked or cold joints on SMD parts. That capacitor can cause issues to chips. I would take a closer look at the board to make sure everything is good before pulling the multi io.
I'm with Necroware on "don't use EDO on 486". I have two 486 PCI boards that are supposed to work with EDO (it says in manual that EDO is supported), but they never actually worked. I think the safest way would be to use a single 4MB or 8MB FPM SIMM. Also don't forget that Dallas is not just a clock chip, it also has some static RAM inside used for saving BIOS settings. There were multiple variations of Dallas chip with slight differences, make sure you use the right one (may the photos of other boards help you). Guess what would happen in case SRAM go bad or there's bad contact between the Dallas and the chipset... Personally I think these boards overall are not very reliable. PCI is cool and all, it lets you use a better and cheaper graphics card on your 486. But in my experience these boards are very "flaky" and require a certain combination of all hardware to work properly. Good luck on this one!
I had the same experience with PCI on a 486. at the time of the first PCI main boards it was still a new slandered and no one was 100% on its support so it is hit or miss on what will even work. After boxing up the "486-VIP-IO" I scored a VLB / ISA mainboard and have not looked back. The VESA Local Bus is the way to go on 486's
@@Mr_Meowingtons Exactly how I feel. I’m wrestling with a Gateway P5-60 that was manufactured in Jan 94. That was really early PCI days and boy does it show...
I would have tried an intel chip instead of the cyrix. Since it even displayed pentium pro which is socket 8, there was certainly something not configured correctly. Anytime I do this type of troubleshooting, first get the processor to display correctly. You might get a completely different outcome.
Maybe, but that wouldn't be my first avenue of investigation. The problems with the floppy and ports seem independent of detecting the CPU. The BIOS itself seems to run fine despite miss-identifying the CPU.
@@stevesether Agreed...I know in the past I have had boards with really weird actions that cleared up once the processor misconfiguration had been resolved.
@@1971merlin I cant count the number of boards with problems that flashing the bios was the fix. If the bios doesn't understand a completely different architecture like the Cyrix, maybe faulty ports and floppy drive recognition could be the outcome. Use a chip the board understands and then see if the results are the same.
@@1971merlin: And it got me looking down the rabbit hole of how the two CPUIDs are confused - there's also some interesting stuff to read about the Cyrix CPUs having I/O delays and sometimes having the CPUID functionality turned off on a page at the UCA 486 Adapter site. I would provide a link if I could.
That one row of pins on the IC looks like there's some slight shorts, so could be that causing it to act weird, I'd want to remove the chip and re-do the soldering with it properly aligned to the pads on the board, and if that doesn't fix it, then I'm stumped... :S
I was going to make the same suggestion. I'd remove and redo the solder on the reworked areas. It's also possible that there are other places where the connections have cracked or broken. And then there's always the possible of a bad via. Of course you could go full CuriousMarc and make a custom debugger BIOS to do detailed debugging of the board :)
Your french translation skills are spot-on ! Ça doit être intéressant d'avoir une conversation en français avec vous ! Excellente vidéo comme toujours !
FDC fault usually is a result of accidental shorting of -12 V or -5 V rails and DRQ2 at ISA bus. They are routed to the ajacent pins at ISA connector and can easily be shorted by inaccurate insertion of ISA VGA. It can not be fixed by just replacing super IO chip. You also need to replace the chipset that contains DMA (8237 equivalent) inside. During "pure ISA" era it was a very common malfunction, and we had to find the workaround. We found the FDC controller for XT that had its' own BIOS to support 1.44 FD at XT, modified this bios to use DRQ0 and rewired the DMA request and ack.
I congratulate you so much for having taken time to 'understand' this french letter. Many other guys would'nt even put any effort on that. And.. this helped you a lot starting this fixing. Big thumb up !
RE: Poutin sauce, I remember going to Canada for the first time ca. 1997. I was working on the road in Grand Forks, ND, and we finished our work early. I drove up the Interstate towards the Canadian border (and Winnipeg, Manitoba after that). We stopped in a small Canadian town between the border and Winnipeg, and skipped off into a local bar for some lunch. I ordered a sandwich and some fries (with a Moulson!), and was totally not expecting my fries to come out with gravy. It was a delicious introduction to our neighbors up North 😋
Your translation is perfect Adrian :) Vous avez une carte-mère et un contrôleur de disquette à votre disposition ;) As usual, a really deligthful and waited videos, always waiting for your next videos, on your both channels As you say, stay healthy and stay safe :D
I don't think anyone forgot how difficult these 486 boards were to set up... We have intentionally repressed these memories... Especially when you plugged in your late model 80 MHz 3 volt CPU and forgot that you had a configured to 5 volt... :/
I am glad you have the expertise to troubleshoot non Intel 486 hardware. I built my 486 in 1991. I used a Micronics motherboard and Intel processor, and sound blaster sound cards. I played it safe and I never had any issues. When you left the comfort of Intel processors and chipsets, that is when my friends had issues.
The reason why the CMOS wouldn't clear is that the DS12887 doesn't support it. It's missing the "RAM clear" pin. The board probably originally shipped with the DS12B887 which does have the pin in place, but it's not made anymore. If you use a third party solution such as the GlitchWorks GW12887, they do have the pin and would work fine.
Hi Adrian, I bit reversed engineered (and decompressed) the BIOSes. The UM8663AF likely uses I/O port 0x108 and 0x109. To talk to this chip, you need to enter configuration mode, do one read or write and then exit configuration mode. As the datasheet is not known, check IT8705 instead to what I'm talking about. See chapter 8 - "configuring sequence description" in the IT8705 datasheet. Basically it is ISA PnP. The chip configuration is only on the bus if right I/O port knock is done. The superIO uses usually some banks called "logical devices" to configure the base addreses of FDC, UARTs etc. This chip does follow the general layout like that. It could be interesting to see if the Add On card also responds to the 0x108/0x109. The add on card is likely to use strap resistors/jumpers to set it up. Maybe it disables the 108/109 access. You can write some program and try to access the chip. Or you can use DEBUG from MS-DOS to do the I/O port dance, which is is as follows: enter key is "0x4a 0x6c", do stuff, and enter exit key is "0x34". In more details, write 0x4a to I/O port 0x108, write 0x6c to I/O port 0x108, write register index to I/O port 0x108, read or write data from I/O port 0x109, exit configuration by write 0x34 to the I/O port 0x108. There seems to be some registers on index 0xb0 0xb1 as I have seen. In the uud0520s.bin I seen also "0xaa" to enter and 0x55 to exit. Maybe it is for the "BF" revision of the chip. So, the problem you are seeing is that maybe BIOS cannot program the chip correctly. Do you happen to have some ISA bus analyzer? The problem is probably with ISA bus, that it does not work (as it breaks with your XT IDE add on card). Second problem could be that the timing of bus is wrong. Maybe this can be configured in a BIOS? The bios inserts some jumps to slow down the access to each I/O port, maybe your CPU is too fast? (sorry dont know if the CPU you use ever worked ever in there). The cyrix cpus had some smart stuff with advanced branch prediction. I'm really curious what is the problem with that. I'm happy to help if you need more information about this topic. I can provide more details of how I figure it out. Your website seems to have some SSL problem and I can't access it. Rudolf
Translation was spot on. And really cool to see the motherboard I have in my AMD 486-DX4 100Mhz build on the channel. Hope you get it running it’s an amazing board with a ton of support and expandibility
I actually know a good bit of French, and your translation was spot on. I’ve never even been to Quebec, but I grew up close to Louisiana. Now, I work in a Latino area, and speak more Spanish than French.
Hanging on "Updating the ESCD..." usually indicates incompatible BIOS ROM IC, ESCD is stored in Flash BIOS or in CMOS RAM. If code does not know how to address/access target device (wrong Flash ROM organization or bad CMOS RAM) it just hangs on this stage. And stuck COM ports may indicate incompatible Multi-I/O IC that chipset can not control properly. Or wrong BIOS image that can not configure that chipset correctly.
When you were reading the letter I was thinking, I hope he packed to old chip, ie, it might NOT be faulty, and it might be the only one that will work.
"I'm so bad at this" - proceeds to translate the whole text perfectly quite impressed that a quebecois would use so much english terms. I always heard that they were quite intransigent on using french words.
You heard wrong, for things of a technical nature such as this most of us would use the English words, not the little known French words. This is especially true when talking to someone or writing an email... It is in more official documents or advertising that there is an effort made of using French words only, not in everyday life...
Your french is still spot on. Funny thing is I’ve met Nicolas in person quite a few times. Small world it is. I’ve noticed you also seem to be into cars and i can tell you Nicolas and I worked on cars quite a bit too :)
OMG! Everything on this channel makes me feel old! LOL! I remember putting a 486dx4 120 with 32 megs together for my dad back in the late 80s...8 megs each piece...man that was expensive!! Ffirst gen pentium came out shortly after that....no way he was gonna pay those prices! Lol...thanks for the memories!
Hey Adrian ! Just to let you know that your french -> english translation is not as bad as you think ;=) I know because... je parle français aussi :) Keep up the good work with your videos, amazing channel you have here ! Cheers, from Sherbrooke, Québec Edit: Floppy controller = contrôleur de lecteur de disquettes Motherboard / mainboard = carte mère, carte maîtresse
I wonder if one or more pins that connect to the realtime clock/NVRAM chip are shorted to either the ground plane or the power plane. It wouldn't necessarily make anything blow up, but it could cause the wrong data to be returned in response to a request. So no matter what you save, that's not what the chipset is hearing even though it displays it on the screen.
When you change the BIOS settings, it programs the CMOS battery-backed memory cells in the RTC chip. When a BIOS goes through POST it reads the settings in the RTC CMOS and will enable or disable the I/O peripherals and configure it according to the values stored in CMOS. The Dallas chip is clearly not remembering settings. So I would remove the Dallas RTC socket and look for shorts or broken traces or through-holes. Even without a good battery, you should be able to set the time and see it tick in seconds whilst it is on - a time of 0:0:0 shows it is not ticking even with board power (or it cannot be read). See last 64 bytes of the firmware to check mainboad model/BIOS rev.
See, I was more a fan of the FIC 486-VIPIO2 motherboard myself. Four PCI, Three 16 bit ISA, two of which had VESA extensions. Also had four 72 pin simm slots for up to 128MB ram and supported 1mb cache.
Chips and gravy are very well known here in the UK, especially in the northern parts ;) Cheese curds is certainly something different though. We do have "cheesy chips" here but its usually either grated cheddar or mozarella put over chips just out of the fryer, and left to melt... and usually not with gravy! I'd definitely have a go, though :)
In french, floppy disk is "Disquette" and motherboard is "carte mère" :) You did pretty well actually. I think I wouldn't have been better than you doing the same thing. Also we have a picture of this board on ultimateretro by someone named pshipkov. We also have a different bios dump straight from some motherboard from 1995. It seems this board originally came with a ODIN OEC12C887A RTC chip. Maybe the dallas clock chips nicolas and you used aren't 100% compatible and are causing all sorts of issues ?
My guess is that the Dallas chip replacement didn't go as planned and the socket wasn't soldered in right; some data bits are not connected, that's why the com ports are always on no matter how you set them
Others have mentioned Perrette as a convenience store. I'll add a perfectly useless bit: Perrette is the first name of the lady "starring" in a fable by Jean de la Fontaine. The fable is called "La laitière et le pot au lait". That translates to something like The Milkmaid And The Milk Jug. I guess she was the inspiration for the store's name... I told you it would be useless !
Given the chip seems to be changes at some point it may be the incorrect chip was installed causing confusion to the bios. Alternately reflow the joints to make sure there's not an issue with a dry joint.
Now I know again why this generation skipped and had word processing and first internet experiences on the Amiga. Switch it on and it worked. Then I moved to Windows NT 2000. The ancestors of XP and Win7.
30:37 yes a food supermarket that made lots of money for the owner. The family that inherited the cash cow ( everyone needs food) fought each other and it died. What a mistake!!! It was a great chain grocery store that I enjoyed to visit as a child while parent(s) shopped.
Hi! The blue shirt logo comes from Perrette. This used to be an old convenience store that was bought by Couche-Tard in 1994. As for Steinberg, this grocery chain was dismantled in 1992.
One more thing to check are the cache chips. Not too long ago I had a 386SX board that had a bad TAG chip and one bad SRAM chip. It caused ghosts in the machine with bizarre seemingly unrelated behavior. It wasn't until I removed and replaced them did the board start acting normal again, but it had similar issues with floppy/IDE issues and the random garbage on the screen with lockups trying to boot into DOS.
In the US we call those "Disco Fries" and they use mozzarella cheese. I built my first computer in 1997 when I was 10 and I hated the myriad of jumpers you had to set. The CPU was an AMD K6-II 400MHz. My first computer I ever had was an Epson with a Cyrix 486 DX2 50MHz which I upgraded to 75MHz and 64MB SIMMs. I once blew a motherboard because I had no manual but at least it was only $10 so it wasn't too bad. Got to love the smell of the soul of a circuit board.
I have Asus PVI-486SP3 and it has all the jumpers in one corner, quite easy to manage. Some boards have them all over the place so it's hard to find them one by one.
Steinberg was the largest Quebec grocery store until they went out of business in the 80s. I am pretty sure that the other t-shirt has the logo of another very large Quebec convenience store. A « dépanneur » called « perrette ». It also went out of business in the 80s. But being born In Montreal, you probably never encountered one since they where mostly present on the south shore suburbs. Your translation was pretty awesome for a guy that left Quebec at 7 years of age. There are english speaking people that spent all their life in Montreal that would not have been able to translate it at all. A tribute to your intelligence. Continue ton excellent travail. ;-)
Adrian, good stuff. Yep, sometimes the board won't post without a clock chip. I have a 486 I'm working on that has a bad CR battery that needs replacing to save the cost settings. Problem is every new battery I use makes the board not post. But if I use the depleted Japanese cr2032 that was on the board, it will post. Gremlins!
As early as the 1990s, the landline Telcos were using 386 and/or 486 motherboards in their CO's during the phase-out of mechanical (crossbar and Strowger) switching. A lot of the old line cards remain in place today, but I don't know how many CO's use 386 boards anymore, except in rural areas...
re. clearing CMOS with jumper. You have to read the mainboard manual! Some boards require you to just move the jumper with power off. Some require power to be on, some get damaged if power is on when jumper is moved. Some need to be powered up with jumper on, then switch off, then move jumper back.
I drank pickle brine as a kid-only once or twice. I guess even my kids idiocy had it's limits LOL Since you learned French at such an early age,it should stay with you(no matter how rusty you are) especially in written form. I learned Spanish in H S and my written comprehension is very good,much better than my person to person interactions in it. As for the PC stuff,great as always.
Maybe during it's life, that motherboard has been fiddled with to death by some less than experienced hands. Being a sought after board, who knows what sort of overclocking shenanigans it has been subjected to. If anyone can get to the bottom of it, you can. 😊
I surely remember these logos. Steinberg were grocery stores and the blue shirt stands for Perette convinience stores that are now mostly couche-tard in Québec or Mack's elsewhere. I used to buy mini sip at Perette's that juice in a bag you had a small straw to pierce the bag and drink.
You can be glad tht the viewer is from Québec and not from France. ;-)In France, I have seen people go above and beyond just to avoid commonly understood English terms. I don't speak any French (just German and English), and I remember to have come across a Bull branded PC in the 386 days. Its BIOS setup menu was in French. And it was not just an option, nope, it was the *only* language it supported. It seems to me that Canadians whose primary language is French are more flexible there and accept that certain terms are just used worldwide. (as a comparison, even when talking about computer hardware to other Germans, you will see the terms "motherboard" or "mainboard" used in German conversation. I don't think there even is a well established German name for it. One could say "Hauptplatine" which would be a pretty direct translation of mainboard, and I am sure people would understand it, but it's not commonly used.
I have colleagues that were born n France which use a lot of English words when there is a perfectly acceptable word for it in French. I am not talking of words of a technical nature where most people (me included) would use the English words, just everyday words that, for some weird reason, they seem to feel the need to use the English word... As for the Bull branded PC, my guess is that Bull might have been forced by the government to use French on their PC to get contracts from the government...
You should try the Turkish drink salgam (pronounced shalgam) it's made by lactic acid fermentation of aromatic turnips and purple carrots. It has a distinct pickle flavour and comes either with or without chilli.
Very interesting indeed. Also I remember those two shirts that you received. Steinberg was a local grocery store. I had close by as well. The one in blue with the milk jug with the letter P in there. Is a depanner or English equivalent convenience store that had sometimes had a gas station as well named called Perrette I believe is the spelling.
Your theory that the issue is caused by the chipset, in the chipset not configuring the I/O chip correctly is wrong. You can configure the UM8663 either through jumpers or through software configuration using magic I/O access patterns. On the Biostar board, the BIOS is knows how to configure the Super I/O chip according to the CMOS settings, so jumpers are unneeded. Your problem with the CPU type not showing up as Cx486DX2-S points towards a problem with interfacing the RTC/RAM chip: The processor type is stored in the CMOS RAM during boot. The bad readings "Pentium Pro" / "Cx5x86" seem to indicate that storing/retrieving data is unreliable. Your Cx486DX2 is a 5V chip unless it has a "V" in the model number. Running it at 3.45V can cause erratic behaviour. In case of misbehaving FDC + serial port, check whether the crystal at the Super I/O oscillates correctly. Missing clock on a super I/O chip can cause behavior like what you observe.
I have v2 and v3.1 of this motherboard and if I remember correctly, didn't have that problem with any of the 2 bioses you mentioned. I'll put my money on a loose connection/trace or a missing or bad cap / resistor.
Really, the BIOS doesn’t line up one bit. So I definitely think you should try to obtain the original BIOS first, before you’re starting to diagnose the rest. The fact that there wasn’t any sticker on the EEPROM, is a clear sign of someone messing with the BIOS versions. Also the fact that a lot of things don’t line up with the hardware (CPU type, LPT, COM, Floppy, etc) almost even confirms it. The “Updating ESCD” is due to a PnP compatible BIOS. Sometimes a motherboard keeps hanging at that stage because of a fault in the BIOS settings (which is saved, but not configurable, so a corruption in the settings). You’ll be able to reset that by first resetting the BIOS through the motherboard jumper. And afterwards loading BIOS defaults and directly save settings.
I'm guessing that the different suffixes of the chip has to do with plug and play. The BIOS, chipset and "ultra i/o" need to properly interact. A non pnp chip depends on jumpers (as most isa boards with the similar chip), but your BIOS pnp needs to configure it and the chip needs to expect it. ESCD update is when something in nvram needs updated to current settings.
I would have pulled that chip and reinstalled it. Then again I'm very comfortable with SMD rework. Someone didn't do a very good job when they replaced it.
On one of the badly misaligned chips, I didn't see you test for shorts between pins. @ 9:35, double check that area, there's a couple pins that look mighty close to bridging...
I have that same motherboard with a bad issue as well the guy before me ripped the Dallas chip out damaging all the traces. I would love to repair install a socket but need to know where the traces trace back to to bodge
Steinberg's grocery chain was founded by Ms. Steinberg in Montréal and the P t-shirt is the Perette's convienience store; The're both closed since many many years ! No wonder you don't remember. Most anglos would go to Dominion grocery instead !
Your French is actually not so bad, as far as reading text. You certainly got a lot further than I would have gotten with that letter without typing it into Google Translate. :-)
72 pin SIMMs are supposed to be installed in pairs starting with the lowest bank. I would put the Dallas chip in that yields the correct frequency at boot. I believe there is a way to jump a battery onto those old Dallas chips when they die. Make sure the CMOS ram timings and whatnot are correct. Also, the board needs to support the speed of the ram you're using. The Bios that said Pentium pro-s 66 was probably the correct one. The board probably wants an Intel cpu. Edit: looks like single 72 pin simm might be okay on 486 but I don't feel this was common practice at the time. Seems to be some debate on this around the net. These old machines were very picky about the RAM and would do weird stuff if it wasn't correct.
I can find multiple sources for the chip with a couple thousand in stock each vendor, but at on the vendors website the datasheet is blank. Even if they could send you a copy at one point, how do they think to get rid of the old stock without generating interest in the repair and hobby space? I doubt that someone outside of that space would make a product with these chips knowing that the chip stock is 25 years old and could end any day.
I guess this motherboard should have an extended CMOS memory (extra page), probably in the clock chip, which is referenced as ESCD. So my wild guess is the problem is in (or around) the clock chip.
Hey Question for you, it looks like you're using a USB to VGA crash cart type product? I'm curious how you go the picture in-picture on your screen, is it one of those startech things?
OK, I have questions - which BIOStar board is it EXACTLY? The ones shown on the forum are not the same. They may be similar, but they aren't the same. Ugh, EDO. Those WEREN'T the days. PITA. Also, I'm unclear why there seemed to be a board with I/O ports plugged in. One serial and one parallel used to come on-board the mobos of the era. My first troubleshooting step would be to unplug ALL the cards except the video card and see what shows on screen and try manipulating the BIOS with nothing but the RAM and the video card installed. So much was on-board by this time. Unfortunately, there were also about a billion jumpers to check. It could be that the jumpers - or just one - is telling the BIOS different signals are different settings. The real question is could you go to the e-Waste recycling store and pick up one to compare it to for troubleshooting (you can never have too many mobos, right? j/k).
I had some covid weight, New medical diagnoses lead me to begin walking more and I went from 200 down to 170... I haven't been 170 since 2005.... I feel super great of late :)
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Hi Adrian! This is really a great mainboard and incidentally I'm currently preparing my next video about a similar board. So allow me please to share some thoughts. First of all, yes, most of the PC mainboards don't run without RTC, so it's normal, that this board refused to work without the Dallas module. Then most of 486 don't run with EDO RAM at all and the ones which do run with it, very often end up in very unexpected behavior. So, to make your life easier always test all the 486 mainboards with FPM RAM. I also would suggest to test the 486 boards with the Intel DX2-66 or DX-33 first, since especially Cyrix can make some headaches and can end up in a very strange behavior. I found, that manuals are unfortunately sometimes wrong about it and since Cyrix is not a clone of the Intel CPU, but a complete custom design, some boards seem not to like it. The UUD960520S is the version of the BIOS (May 20th 1996). As far as I found recently, many similar boards with the same chipset existed with different I/O controllers SMCS and UMC and you need the right BIOS to run it properly. And last but not least, did you try the BIOS from the Ultimate Retro project site? There you can find the UUD951108A and may be that one works?
Hijacking the thread to say I'm a big fan of your channel and your insight really makes sense. People should really vote this up!
@@MrKeebs Glad you mentioned that. Now subscribed to that channel.
@@MrKeebs I agree, this board needs a more thorough troubleshoot. I watch Necroware all the time so hope his comment gets read by Adrian.
I was going to mention you actually. Guru himself have spoken :-)))))
Yea I am kinda not surprised people often try using EDO ram only to run into issues with these boards never mind the boards just being picky as usual. The joys of 90s retro builds.
As someone that did surface mount I saw many problems with that Multi io chip and the capacitor at 10:06. The multi io will need to at least be reflowed because some of the pins may be making contact when you use your probes to check continuity but when the chip is powered on it will heat up even a small amount and that can cause the pins to lift off of solder pads and cause a high resistance. Getting that aligned on the pads will greatly help. Also the capacitor that you showed has a crack in the joint to the left of the component. It will need to be reflowed. It looks like it had partially heated and started to melt when the heat was taken away and it created a cold joint. I used to use side lighting and rotation to help identify cracked or cold joints on SMD parts. That capacitor can cause issues to chips. I would take a closer look at the board to make sure everything is good before pulling the multi io.
While the traces passed continuity, there looked to be potential bridges on some of the pins you tested.
I'm with Necroware on "don't use EDO on 486". I have two 486 PCI boards that are supposed to work with EDO (it says in manual that EDO is supported), but they never actually worked. I think the safest way would be to use a single 4MB or 8MB FPM SIMM.
Also don't forget that Dallas is not just a clock chip, it also has some static RAM inside used for saving BIOS settings. There were multiple variations of Dallas chip with slight differences, make sure you use the right one (may the photos of other boards help you). Guess what would happen in case SRAM go bad or there's bad contact between the Dallas and the chipset...
Personally I think these boards overall are not very reliable. PCI is cool and all, it lets you use a better and cheaper graphics card on your 486. But in my experience these boards are very "flaky" and require a certain combination of all hardware to work properly. Good luck on this one!
I had the same experience with PCI on a 486. at the time of the first PCI main boards it was still a new slandered and no one was 100% on its support so it is hit or miss on what will even work.
After boxing up the "486-VIP-IO" I scored a VLB / ISA mainboard and have not looked back. The VESA Local Bus is the way to go on 486's
@@Mr_Meowingtons Exactly how I feel. I’m wrestling with a Gateway P5-60 that was manufactured in Jan 94. That was really early PCI days and boy does it show...
I would have tried an intel chip instead of the cyrix. Since it even displayed pentium pro which is socket 8, there was certainly something not configured correctly. Anytime I do this type of troubleshooting, first get the processor to display correctly. You might get a completely different outcome.
Maybe, but that wouldn't be my first avenue of investigation.
The problems with the floppy and ports seem independent of detecting the CPU. The BIOS itself seems to run fine despite miss-identifying the CPU.
Naah it's just an earlier bios that doesn't have the cpuid of the Cyrix chip in its database.
@@stevesether Agreed...I know in the past I have had boards with really weird actions that cleared up once the processor misconfiguration had been resolved.
@@1971merlin I cant count the number of boards with problems that flashing the bios was the fix. If the bios doesn't understand a completely different architecture like the Cyrix, maybe faulty ports and floppy drive recognition could be the outcome. Use a chip the board understands and then see if the results are the same.
@@1971merlin: And it got me looking down the rabbit hole of how the two CPUIDs are confused - there's also some interesting stuff to read about the Cyrix CPUs having I/O delays and sometimes having the CPUID functionality turned off on a page at the UCA 486 Adapter site. I would provide a link if I could.
That one row of pins on the IC looks like there's some slight shorts, so could be that causing it to act weird, I'd want to remove the chip and re-do the soldering with it properly aligned to the pads on the board, and if that doesn't fix it, then I'm stumped... :S
I was going to make the same suggestion. I'd remove and redo the solder on the reworked areas. It's also possible that there are other places where the connections have cracked or broken. And then there's always the possible of a bad via.
Of course you could go full CuriousMarc and make a custom debugger BIOS to do detailed debugging of the board :)
@@ovalteen4404: That being "CuriousMarc" associate Eric (TubeTimeUS) Schlaepfer - No idea where the replacement board came from, BTW.
Your french translation skills are spot-on ! Ça doit être intéressant d'avoir une conversation en français avec vous ! Excellente vidéo comme toujours !
Adrian that was a very good translation and it was quite impressive to see you translate it so fast on the fly...
google translate.
FDC fault usually is a result of accidental shorting of -12 V or -5 V rails and DRQ2 at ISA bus. They are routed to the ajacent pins at ISA connector and can easily be shorted by inaccurate insertion of ISA VGA. It can not be fixed by just replacing super IO chip. You also need to replace the chipset that contains DMA (8237 equivalent) inside.
During "pure ISA" era it was a very common malfunction, and we had to find the workaround. We found the FDC controller for XT that had its' own BIOS to support 1.44 FD at XT, modified this bios to use DRQ0 and rewired the DMA request and ack.
Awesome interpretation of the letter. This itself could help many people.
Yes, impressing after Adrian claimed that his French skills were basic.
he used google translate you fool......
I congratulate you so much for having taken time to 'understand' this french letter. Many other guys would'nt even put any effort on that. And.. this helped you a lot starting this fixing. Big thumb up !
RE: Poutin sauce, I remember going to Canada for the first time ca. 1997. I was working on the road in Grand Forks, ND, and we finished our work early. I drove up the Interstate towards the Canadian border (and Winnipeg, Manitoba after that). We stopped in a small Canadian town between the border and Winnipeg, and skipped off into a local bar for some lunch. I ordered a sandwich and some fries (with a Moulson!), and was totally not expecting my fries to come out with gravy. It was a delicious introduction to our neighbors up North 😋
You would need to go to Montréal to eat the original... 😉
@@MarbledPaladin that and some smoke meat, an actual brine pickle, and Adrian's preferred drink. To slide everything down.
Your translation is perfect Adrian :)
Vous avez une carte-mère et un contrôleur de disquette à votre disposition ;)
As usual, a really deligthful and waited videos, always waiting for your next videos, on your both channels
As you say, stay healthy and stay safe
:D
I joined the PC master race at Pentium, and I'm glad I missed all these jumper settings!
I don't think anyone forgot how difficult these 486 boards were to set up... We have intentionally repressed these memories...
Especially when you plugged in your late model 80 MHz 3 volt CPU and forgot that you had a configured to 5 volt... :/
I am glad you have the expertise to troubleshoot non Intel 486 hardware. I built my 486 in 1991. I used a Micronics motherboard and Intel processor, and sound blaster sound cards. I played it safe and I never had any issues. When you left the comfort of Intel processors and chipsets, that is when my friends had issues.
The reason why the CMOS wouldn't clear is that the DS12887 doesn't support it. It's missing the "RAM clear" pin. The board probably originally shipped with the DS12B887 which does have the pin in place, but it's not made anymore. If you use a third party solution such as the GlitchWorks GW12887, they do have the pin and would work fine.
Hi Adrian,
I bit reversed engineered (and decompressed) the BIOSes. The UM8663AF likely uses I/O port 0x108 and 0x109. To talk to this chip, you need to enter configuration mode, do one read or write and then exit configuration mode. As the datasheet is not known, check IT8705 instead to what I'm talking about. See chapter 8 - "configuring sequence description" in the IT8705 datasheet. Basically it is ISA PnP. The chip configuration is only on the bus if right I/O port knock is done. The superIO uses usually some banks called "logical devices" to configure the base addreses of FDC, UARTs etc. This chip does follow the general layout like that. It could be interesting to see if the Add On card also responds to the 0x108/0x109. The add on card is likely to use strap resistors/jumpers to set it up. Maybe it disables the 108/109 access.
You can write some program and try to access the chip. Or you can use DEBUG from MS-DOS to do the I/O port dance, which is is as follows: enter key is "0x4a 0x6c", do stuff, and enter exit key is "0x34". In more details, write 0x4a to I/O port 0x108,
write 0x6c to I/O port 0x108, write register index to I/O port 0x108, read or write data from I/O port 0x109, exit configuration by write 0x34 to the I/O port 0x108. There seems to be some registers on index 0xb0 0xb1 as I have seen.
In the uud0520s.bin I seen also "0xaa" to enter and 0x55 to exit. Maybe it is for the "BF" revision of the chip.
So, the problem you are seeing is that maybe BIOS cannot program the chip correctly. Do you happen to have some ISA bus analyzer? The problem is probably with ISA bus, that it does not work (as it breaks with your XT IDE add on card). Second problem could be that the timing of bus is wrong. Maybe this can be configured in a BIOS? The bios inserts some jumps to slow down the access to each I/O port, maybe your CPU is too fast? (sorry dont know if the CPU you use ever worked ever in there). The cyrix cpus had some smart stuff with advanced branch prediction.
I'm really curious what is the problem with that. I'm happy to help if you need more information about this topic. I can provide more details of how I figure it out. Your website seems to have some SSL problem and I can't access it.
Rudolf
Translation was spot on. And really cool to see the motherboard I have in my AMD 486-DX4 100Mhz build on the channel. Hope you get it running it’s an amazing board with a ton of support and expandibility
I actually know a good bit of French, and your translation was spot on. I’ve never even been to Quebec, but I grew up close to Louisiana. Now, I work in a Latino area, and speak more Spanish than French.
Hanging on "Updating the ESCD..." usually indicates incompatible BIOS ROM IC, ESCD is stored in Flash BIOS or in CMOS RAM. If code does not know how to address/access target device (wrong Flash ROM organization or bad CMOS RAM) it just hangs on this stage. And stuck COM ports may indicate incompatible Multi-I/O IC that chipset can not control properly. Or wrong BIOS image that can not configure that chipset correctly.
I was stumped when I pulled 2 of these boards out of storage and sold them for $250 a piece. Interesting that this video came on my feed!
I used to build PC's using Biostar boards back in the 1990's. They were very solid motherboards sold at a very good price.
i have an old DFI VLB 486 that rocks.. would not get one of there later boards post 2000's though they got real cheep
When you were reading the letter I was thinking, I hope he packed to old chip, ie, it might NOT be faulty, and it might be the only one that will work.
Wow, makes me think of the many, many, many working 486 motherboards I sent to the recyclers.
Awesome French translation. Love it.
Pleaseeee do not give up! I love the videos where you fight till you prevail all the strange errors.
This brings back memories. I was a big Biostar fanboy back in the day!
Bravo pour la traduction Adrian!
En plein dans le mille!
Spot on translation! Kudos to you Adrian!
"I'm so bad at this" - proceeds to translate the whole text perfectly
quite impressed that a quebecois would use so much english terms. I always heard that they were quite intransigent on using french words.
Sometimes, English words are better suited
You heard wrong, for things of a technical nature such as this most of us would use the English words, not the little known French words. This is especially true when talking to someone or writing an email... It is in more official documents or advertising that there is an effort made of using French words only, not in everyday life...
Perfect, after having a long day at the garage, fixing cars, I can relax and watch what you have here 🍻
Your french is still spot on.
Funny thing is I’ve met Nicolas in person quite a few times. Small world it is.
I’ve noticed you also seem to be into cars and i can tell you Nicolas and I worked on cars quite a bit too :)
OMG! Everything on this channel makes me feel old! LOL! I remember putting a 486dx4 120 with 32 megs together for my dad back in the late 80s...8 megs each piece...man that was expensive!! Ffirst gen pentium came out shortly after that....no way he was gonna pay those prices! Lol...thanks for the memories!
"Who doesn't like pickles?" _(raises hand)_
Hey Adrian !
Just to let you know that your french -> english translation is not as bad as you think ;=)
I know because... je parle français aussi :)
Keep up the good work with your videos, amazing channel you have here !
Cheers, from Sherbrooke, Québec
Edit: Floppy controller = contrôleur de lecteur de disquettes
Motherboard / mainboard = carte mère, carte maîtresse
I wonder if one or more pins that connect to the realtime clock/NVRAM chip are shorted to either the ground plane or the power plane. It wouldn't necessarily make anything blow up, but it could cause the wrong data to be returned in response to a request. So no matter what you save, that's not what the chipset is hearing even though it displays it on the screen.
When you change the BIOS settings, it programs the CMOS battery-backed memory cells in the RTC chip. When a BIOS goes through POST it reads the settings in the RTC CMOS and will enable or disable the I/O peripherals and configure it according to the values stored in CMOS. The Dallas chip is clearly not remembering settings. So I would remove the Dallas RTC socket and look for shorts or broken traces or through-holes. Even without a good battery, you should be able to set the time and see it tick in seconds whilst it is on - a time of 0:0:0 shows it is not ticking even with board power (or it cannot be read). See last 64 bytes of the firmware to check mainboad model/BIOS rev.
Bridge at 9:09. Thanks for the videos!
See, I was more a fan of the FIC 486-VIPIO2 motherboard myself. Four PCI, Three 16 bit ISA, two of which had VESA extensions. Also had four 72 pin simm slots for up to 128MB ram and supported 1mb cache.
I live in Karachi Pakistan and I like your comment
Chips and gravy are very well known here in the UK, especially in the northern parts ;) Cheese curds is certainly something different though. We do have "cheesy chips" here but its usually either grated cheddar or mozarella put over chips just out of the fryer, and left to melt... and usually not with gravy! I'd definitely have a go, though :)
In french, floppy disk is "Disquette" and motherboard is "carte mère" :)
You did pretty well actually. I think I wouldn't have been better than you doing the same thing.
Also we have a picture of this board on ultimateretro by someone named pshipkov. We also have a different bios dump straight from some motherboard from 1995. It seems this board originally came with a ODIN OEC12C887A RTC chip. Maybe the dallas clock chips nicolas and you used aren't 100% compatible and are causing all sorts of issues ?
Absolutely he did pretty well for someone that classify himself as poor in French :).
The letter just says "motherboard" though. 😉
My guess is that the Dallas chip replacement didn't go as planned and the socket wasn't soldered in right; some data bits are not connected, that's why the com ports are always on no matter how you set them
Others have mentioned Perrette as a convenience store. I'll add a perfectly useless bit: Perrette is the first name of the lady "starring" in a fable by Jean de la Fontaine. The fable is called "La laitière et le pot au lait". That translates to something like The Milkmaid And The Milk Jug. I guess she was the inspiration for the store's name... I told you it would be useless !
Please note that if you connect COM1 to the motherboard that it connects to CN1 - the one NOT next to CN3 for LPT1. The one at CN2 is COM2.
Given the chip seems to be changes at some point it may be the incorrect chip was installed causing confusion to the bios. Alternately reflow the joints to make sure there's not an issue with a dry joint.
I'm very impressed by your french skills! Chapeau bas!
Now I know again why this generation skipped and had word processing and first internet experiences on the Amiga. Switch it on and it worked.
Then I moved to Windows NT 2000. The ancestors of XP and Win7.
30:37 yes a food supermarket that made lots of money for the owner. The family that inherited the cash cow ( everyone needs food) fought each other and it died. What a mistake!!! It was a great chain grocery store that I enjoyed to visit as a child while parent(s) shopped.
My god I wish I still had one of the 486 MCA / PCI motherboards they were a pain but fast.
Hi! The blue shirt logo comes from Perrette. This used to be an old convenience store that was bought by Couche-Tard in 1994. As for Steinberg, this grocery chain was dismantled in 1992.
Steinberg was indeed a major chain of grocery stores. "Steinberg is on your side".
One more thing to check are the cache chips. Not too long ago I had a 386SX board that had a bad TAG chip and one bad SRAM chip. It caused ghosts in the machine with bizarre seemingly unrelated behavior. It wasn't until I removed and replaced them did the board start acting normal again, but it had similar issues with floppy/IDE issues and the random garbage on the screen with lockups trying to boot into DOS.
In the US we call those "Disco Fries" and they use mozzarella cheese.
I built my first computer in 1997 when I was 10 and I hated the myriad of jumpers you had to set. The CPU was an AMD K6-II 400MHz.
My first computer I ever had was an Epson with a Cyrix 486 DX2 50MHz which I upgraded to 75MHz and 64MB SIMMs.
I once blew a motherboard because I had no manual but at least it was only $10 so it wasn't too bad. Got to love the smell of the soul of a circuit board.
"I think most people forgot how much of a pain these late model 486 boards were!" - true, but that's also part of the charm, isn't it.
:D It is
I love 486s. The higher end ones always felt like the wheels were gonna come off any second, so just hang on and enjoy the ride while it lasts! 😆
The color of that soda looks something straight out of Fallout 4.
I have Asus PVI-486SP3 and it has all the jumpers in one corner, quite easy to manage. Some boards have them all over the place so it's hard to find them one by one.
14:42 - pretty sure anyone under the age of 30 doesn't appreciate the pain of jumper selection on a motherboard!
Steinberg was the largest Quebec grocery store until they went out of business in the 80s. I am pretty sure that the other t-shirt has the logo of another very large Quebec convenience store. A « dépanneur » called « perrette ». It also went out of business in the 80s. But being born In Montreal, you probably never encountered one since they where mostly present on the south shore suburbs. Your translation was pretty awesome for a guy that left Quebec at 7 years of age. There are english speaking people that spent all their life in Montreal that would not have been able to translate it at all. A tribute to your intelligence. Continue ton excellent travail. ;-)
Adrian, notre youtubeur préféré !
Adrian, good stuff. Yep, sometimes the board won't post without a clock chip. I have a 486 I'm working on that has a bad CR battery that needs replacing to save the cost settings. Problem is every new battery I use makes the board not post. But if I use the depleted Japanese cr2032 that was on the board, it will post. Gremlins!
As early as the 1990s, the landline Telcos were using 386 and/or 486 motherboards in their CO's during the phase-out of mechanical (crossbar and Strowger) switching. A lot of the old line cards remain in place today, but I don't know how many CO's use 386 boards anymore, except in rural areas...
RTC chip contains CMOS used by setup to store BIOS parameters so yeah, it won't run without one...
So jealous of that floppy cable right now trying to get this 8088 working .. drives have card edge.. would be nice to have a cable with both
re. clearing CMOS with jumper. You have to read the mainboard manual! Some boards require you to just move the jumper with power off. Some require power to be on, some get damaged if power is on when jumper is moved. Some need to be powered up with jumper on, then switch off, then move jumper back.
I drank pickle brine as a kid-only once or twice. I guess even my kids idiocy had it's limits LOL Since you learned French at such an early age,it should stay with you(no matter how rusty you are) especially in written form. I learned Spanish in H S and my written comprehension is very good,much better than my person to person interactions in it. As for the PC stuff,great as always.
Maybe during it's life, that motherboard has been fiddled with to death by some less than experienced hands. Being a sought after board, who knows what sort of overclocking shenanigans it has been subjected to. If anyone can get to the bottom of it, you can. 😊
I surely remember these logos. Steinberg were grocery stores and the blue shirt stands for Perette convinience stores that are now mostly couche-tard in Québec or Mack's elsewhere. I used to buy mini sip at Perette's that juice in a bag you had a small straw to pierce the bag and drink.
You can be glad tht the viewer is from Québec and not from France. ;-)In France, I have seen people go above and beyond just to avoid commonly understood English terms. I don't speak any French (just German and English), and I remember to have come across a Bull branded PC in the 386 days. Its BIOS setup menu was in French. And it was not just an option, nope, it was the *only* language it supported. It seems to me that Canadians whose primary language is French are more flexible there and accept that certain terms are just used worldwide. (as a comparison, even when talking about computer hardware to other Germans, you will see the terms "motherboard" or "mainboard" used in German conversation. I don't think there even is a well established German name for it. One could say "Hauptplatine" which would be a pretty direct translation of mainboard, and I am sure people would understand it, but it's not commonly used.
I have colleagues that were born n France which use a lot of English words when there is a perfectly acceptable word for it in French. I am not talking of words of a technical nature where most people (me included) would use the English words, just everyday words that, for some weird reason, they seem to feel the need to use the English word... As for the Bull branded PC, my guess is that Bull might have been forced by the government to use French on their PC to get contracts from the government...
You should try the Turkish drink salgam (pronounced shalgam) it's made by lactic acid fermentation of aromatic turnips and purple carrots. It has a distinct pickle flavour and comes either with or without chilli.
Steinberg was a chain of grocery stores, based in Quebec, but also had stores in Ontario.
The chain went bankrupt in 1992.
Very interesting indeed. Also I remember those two shirts that you received. Steinberg was a local grocery store. I had close by as well. The one in blue with the milk jug with the letter P in there. Is a depanner or English equivalent convenience store that had sometimes had a gas station as well named called Perrette I believe is the spelling.
Merry christmas from Perth, Western Australia mate!
Your theory that the issue is caused by the chipset, in the chipset not configuring the I/O chip correctly is wrong. You can configure the UM8663 either through jumpers or through software configuration using magic I/O access patterns. On the Biostar board, the BIOS is knows how to configure the Super I/O chip according to the CMOS settings, so jumpers are unneeded.
Your problem with the CPU type not showing up as Cx486DX2-S points towards a problem with interfacing the RTC/RAM chip: The processor type is stored in the CMOS RAM during boot. The bad readings "Pentium Pro" / "Cx5x86" seem to indicate that storing/retrieving data is unreliable.
Your Cx486DX2 is a 5V chip unless it has a "V" in the model number. Running it at 3.45V can cause erratic behaviour.
In case of misbehaving FDC + serial port, check whether the crystal at the Super I/O oscillates correctly. Missing clock on a super I/O chip can cause behavior like what you observe.
Hello from your Quebec viewers, and NDG specifically! I believe you said this is your old stomping ground once, if I'm not mistaken
I have v2 and v3.1 of this motherboard and if I remember correctly, didn't have that problem with any of the 2 bioses you mentioned. I'll put my money on a loose connection/trace or a missing or bad cap / resistor.
Really, the BIOS doesn’t line up one bit. So I definitely think you should try to obtain the original BIOS first, before you’re starting to diagnose the rest.
The fact that there wasn’t any sticker on the EEPROM, is a clear sign of someone messing with the BIOS versions. Also the fact that a lot of things don’t line up with the hardware (CPU type, LPT, COM, Floppy, etc) almost even confirms it.
The “Updating ESCD” is due to a PnP compatible BIOS. Sometimes a motherboard keeps hanging at that stage because of a fault in the BIOS settings (which is saved, but not configurable, so a corruption in the settings). You’ll be able to reset that by first resetting the BIOS through the motherboard jumper. And afterwards loading BIOS defaults and directly save settings.
Wow... I got the general gist of that which is amazing to me... first year college french from back in 2003-ish.
That was a solid translation
I'm guessing that the different suffixes of the chip has to do with plug and play. The BIOS, chipset and "ultra i/o" need to properly interact. A non pnp chip depends on jumpers (as most isa boards with the similar chip), but your BIOS pnp needs to configure it and the chip needs to expect it. ESCD update is when something in nvram needs updated to current settings.
I would have pulled that chip and reinstalled it. Then again I'm very comfortable with SMD rework. Someone didn't do a very good job when they replaced it.
I had a soda journey myself. My favorites were the following in no particular order. Cel-Ray, Cheerwine, Dr. Enuf, Moxie, and Irn Bru
The only poutine I've had was at the Dairy Belle in Dania Beach, Florida. It's owned by a family from Quebec. I'm definitely hooked on poutine now.
Hi Adrian.. In french Motherboard is "carte mère" ( I think you'd have guessed) and Floppy Disk is "Diskette" (maybe a bit more difficult)
The logo on the blue t-shirt come from the convenience store 'Laiterie Perrette'. Couche-Tard absorbed this company in the 90s
I saw that same box cutter at Walmart yesterday. It has a ceramic blade. Opens boxes but won't cut your hand. :D
On one of the badly misaligned chips, I didn't see you test for shorts between pins. @ 9:35, double check that area, there's a couple pins that look mighty close to bridging...
Steinberg, makers of Cubase
love your videos, 16mb sounds like a lot of ram that might not be working, worth trying paired smaller sticks ?
In the pc em emulator I like to deliberately use the wrong bios with different systems to see what happens.
I have that same motherboard with a bad issue as well the guy before me ripped the Dallas chip out damaging all the traces. I would love to repair install a socket but need to know where the traces trace back to to bodge
12:12 on the left side of the screen halfway up under the sharpie mark, broken trace? Just to the left of where you put your left probe.
I’d solve the BIOS problem before tackling any problem with the chipset. I’d also see if you can find a replacement for the clock chip.
Steinberg's grocery chain was founded by Ms. Steinberg in Montréal and the P t-shirt is the Perette's convienience store; The're both closed since many many years ! No wonder you don't remember. Most anglos would go to Dominion grocery instead !
Your French is actually not so bad, as far as reading text. You certainly got a lot further than I would have gotten with that letter without typing it into Google Translate. :-)
72 pin SIMMs are supposed to be installed in pairs starting with the lowest bank. I would put the Dallas chip in that yields the correct frequency at boot. I believe there is a way to jump a battery onto those old Dallas chips when they die. Make sure the CMOS ram timings and whatnot are correct. Also, the board needs to support the speed of the ram you're using. The Bios that said Pentium pro-s 66 was probably the correct one. The board probably wants an Intel cpu. Edit: looks like single 72 pin simm might be okay on 486 but I don't feel this was common practice at the time. Seems to be some debate on this around the net. These old machines were very picky about the RAM and would do weird stuff if it wasn't correct.
Installing 72-pin SIMMs in pairs is only necessary on Pentium systems because they have a 64-bit memory bus. 486 is 32-bit so a single module is fine.
I was hoping I could provide you with an original BIOS, because the motherboard looked familiar, but nope mine is a Biostar MB-8433UUC, sorry!
I can find multiple sources for the chip with a couple thousand in stock each vendor, but at on the vendors website the datasheet is blank. Even if they could send you a copy at one point, how do they think to get rid of the old stock without generating interest in the repair and hobby space? I doubt that someone outside of that space would make a product with these chips knowing that the chip stock is 25 years old and could end any day.
I guess this motherboard should have an extended CMOS memory (extra page), probably in the clock chip, which is referenced as ESCD. So my wild guess is the problem is in (or around) the clock chip.
Hey Question for you, it looks like you're using a USB to VGA crash cart type product? I'm curious how you go the picture in-picture on your screen, is it one of those startech things?
OK, I have questions - which BIOStar board is it EXACTLY? The ones shown on the forum are not the same. They may be similar, but they aren't the same. Ugh, EDO. Those WEREN'T the days. PITA.
Also, I'm unclear why there seemed to be a board with I/O ports plugged in. One serial and one parallel used to come on-board the mobos of the era. My first troubleshooting step would be to unplug ALL the cards except the video card and see what shows on screen and try manipulating the BIOS with nothing but the RAM and the video card installed. So much was on-board by this time. Unfortunately, there were also about a billion jumpers to check. It could be that the jumpers - or just one - is telling the BIOS different signals are different settings. The real question is could you go to the e-Waste recycling store and pick up one to compare it to for troubleshooting (you can never have too many mobos, right? j/k).
I had some covid weight, New medical diagnoses lead me to begin walking more and I went from 200 down to 170... I haven't been 170 since 2005.... I feel super great of late :)