Update bios with microcode..

Recommended by Wim's BIOS...

Hello lads.
I'm hoping someone here can help me with a tweak for an ami
bios I have here for a HP system.
It's a 443BX chipset MoBo with an AGP slot & was hoping to run
a P3 cpu in it, it currently detects a P3-600 as an
" Intel Unknown @600 mhz" when running a 600 P3, so I was hoping
someone here could steer me in the right direction in how to do so...
The latest bios for the system is HT0108.rom..
I have a similar system made by Compaq running the same chipset
but it has no agp slot...
I was hoping to use this as an upgrade for my daughter who's
system is currently a GA5ax socket 7 system, she watches DVD's
on it in her bedroom...

Cheers..

[Denniss]

What HP system are we talking about ? Does HP offer a newer Bios ?

Have you tried to upgrade the Socket-7 system ? With enough memory, a CPU of ~300 MHz and at least an ATI Rage 128 this should be perfecly fine to watch DVD.

Looks like this is a HP Vectra VE 6xxx Series 7 or 8. I assume the latest BIOS is already installed? In any case this is not (only) a case of missing microcode, the CPU detection routine doesn't know the PIII either. If the processor used isn't a Coppermine but an oldschool Katmai room heating, the BIOS must be rather old indeed. The microcode itself could probably be uploaded with ctmc.

I recall something about DVD playback requiring some more CPU horsepower on (super) socket 7 systems, so one may have to use a K6-2 500 or some K6-x+ together with the ATI card (pretty much a must in any case).

In reply to denniss, The HP system I was hoping to give her was indeed
a VE 6 series 8, slot1 MoBo with an agp slot..
My daughters system currently has a K6-2/500 cpu with a TNT2 32mb
video card, & 256mb of pc133 ram, but still , to watch DVD's on it is
annoying with the frame skipping,, the revision of board is a 5.2 which
runs the 40gig H/D at udma66, so I figured the only way to speed it
up would be a K6-3 cpu, which are hard to find here in Australia, common
in the US, but the postage always tends to kill the price a little..
I even tried running it at 550mhz but found it didn't always fire up when
turned on..
My daughter is only 8 at the moment & didn't plan on upgrading to
a P4 just yet, although she knows her way around the system pretty well
as they teach them computers in school these days..
The HP system was given to me with a dead bios...
I unsoldered the chip, reprogrammed it with the PCB3b willem
programmer I have here, then resoldered a plcc mount to the board,
although I had to remove the bottom of the plcc mount in order to access
the joints to solder it back on, I just sat the bottom back into the holder
so the chip didn't push down too far when placed into the socket..
If the board didn't have an agp slot, I wouldn't have bothered, i'd have
just saved the chip & trashed the board..

In reply to stephan_g, yes it is a VE 6 series 8, it has the latest bios
downloaded from HP, which is the HT0108.rom
I browsed the HP sight in regards to availability of downloadable
microcode but found it was only released to developers..
The bios date itself is 11th of January 2000, almost the same bios date
for the equivalent Compaq counterpart I have here which has the same
chipset & runs a P3-600, unfortunately no agp slot,, even the
jumper/switch settings for the compaq are the same for the HP system..

If the system actually POSTs completely, I wouldn't bother with the incorrect CPU detection and just upload the matching microcode update with ctmc:
http://www.heise.de/ct/ftp/ctsi.shtml
Microcode patches can be found on
ftp://ftp.sandpile.org/mcupdate/
I would get everything for 68x if it's a Coppermine (67x for Katmais) and merge it into one file (8.3) with a hex editor (I've used the trusty WinVi32 in hex mode for this; copy /b should also work); ctmc should then grab the right patch.
Do check performance afterwards, just in case the BIOS fails to init the caches correctly.

Oh, and DVD watching on the old system should already give a lot better results when using an ATI card - the TNT2 didn't have any DVD acceleration built-in yet, and IIRC 100% software decoding requires at least a 600...800 MHz PIII or thereabouts. When I had a dual Celeron 300A rig with Rage 128, DVD playback was pretty much glitch-free (it also depends on the efficiency of the software used).

Thanks for the tips there stephan_g, gives me a project to knock over
tomorrow....

As you may have guessed already, i'm just doing this for the learning
curve & experience of having done it, I find I learn more from having
a go, i'm still a novice at tasks like this..

The only other graphics card I have here atm is a Gforce 2mx200,32mb..
Finding an old ati agp that has any reasonable amount of memory
seems hard to find these days on ebay here where I live....

Cheers.!

[Denniss]

The GF2MX should have more function integrated to play DVd movies than the old TNT2 and graphics should be way faster, too. You may even want to look for older ATI Radeon cards, 7200/7500 or 8500/9100

Denniss wrote:

The GF2MX should have more function integrated to play DVd movies than the old TNT2 and graphics should be way faster, too. You may even want to look for older ATI Radeon cards, 7200/7500 or 8500/9100

I'll try that card out if I fail to update this HP system..

Mr stephan_g
I downloaded the ctmc program & the microcode updates you posted
above, Thanks again,, I merged all the 67x files together to make one
40kb file using XVI32 by opening the 1st microcode, then pressing
the file button on top, then the insert button, & inserted all the 67x
microcodes 1 by 1 until they were all merged, then saved the file
& called it P3MICROC.ODE , then booted to dos with a boot disk
& typed "ctmc p2microc.ode /write"
It then seemed as though it was verifying the contents of the
p3microc.ode file, then showed a smiley face at the end of each
code it verified, then said "Microcode update 02h is newer than the
actual update 00h"
"Try to write bios (y/n)"
to which I typed "y" then enter, it then supposedly updated the bios
& told me it was successful, & to reboot, to which I did, but it still
says I unknown @ 600mhz when booting..
This time I allowed it to fully boot into the OS itself ,which was 98se,
I ran dxdiag & it reports the cpu as being a P3 @ 600mhz, but the
running system is as slow as it gets, as if it were a P1 system or worse..
Odd thing too now is it ticks in the speaker whilst counting the ram,
similar to the old 80386/486 systems with an ami bios..
Funny enough too, the ctmc program says it's an FIC oem board..
I found a number on the board that says it's a VB-609,
in doing a search on google I found THIS PAGE where someone else with the same
idea as me has attempted to do the same thing...
On this page it says the board is similar to a VB-601, so I got one
of my spare chips & flashed it with the bios from a VB-601 & found it
booted & detected the cpu as a P3-600 no problems, just didn't detect
the floppy as the I/O chip is different, It even detected a P3-700
no problems..
Iv'e run out of ideas at the moment, given my limited knowledge...
any help is greatly appreciated...
Cheers..

[Denniss]

What I/O chip does this board use ?

FIC does have at least three different revisions of this board (1.1, 1.2/1.3 and 1.4). IT is possible they all use a different I/O chip, maybe one matches your board.

http://www.fic.com.tw/support/motherboa ... _bios.aspx

Denniss wrote:

What I/O chip does this board use ?

FIC does have at least three different revisions of this board (1.1, 1.2/1.3 and 1.4). IT is possible they all use a different I/O chip, maybe one matches your board.

http://www.fic.com.tw/support/motherboa ... _bios.aspx

I actually downloaded all 50 odd bios updates from the US FTP SIGHT
,,Some of which were 128kb roms/bin files, almost every single file I flashed to A spare chip fired the board up, & detected the P3 cpu's,
not one of them ran the floppy drive, even the 128kb roms fire up the
board..

HP went & used an I/O chip that seems to be one of a kind, even
searching the net in hope of finding another board relating to the chip
turned up nothing..
The I/O chip is an
AMI/Megatrends
nsc97a3
PC873091BW/VLJ

What I'd really like to find is weather or not there's an FIC bios out there
somewhere for the VB-609 board itself.

I'm thinking it's time to move on to greener pastures already..

[KURIAKI]

KenOath wrote:

What I'd really like to find is weather or not there's an FIC bios out there
somewhere for the VB-609 board itself.

I'm not sure... Maybe this one?
http://kuriaki.myftp.org:8245/Archives/ ... %20VB-609/

KURIAKI wrote:

KenOath wrote:

What I'd really like to find is weather or not there's an FIC bios out there
somewhere for the VB-609 board itself.

I'm not sure... Maybe this one?
http://kuriaki.myftp.org:8245/Archives/ ... %20VB-609/

No I saw that when browsing through your collection...
That's actually for This board here.
Mines the HP Vectra VE C/xxx series 8, not 7...That one didn't even
fire the board up at all...

No iv'e had enough, I know when i'm licked, I don't know enough about
bios code to know where or what to change to make it detect & run the
P3 cpus on this one....

Whilst I remember, when browsing through your archives a while back I checked to see if you had a bios for a JossTech 586SV4, but found you
only had the jumper settings as all others do too, except your missing
this picture here,which I found HERE
Even though I never found a bios for it , I did find an asus bios that
worked perfect for the board, I installed 98 1st edition on it to varify that
it was compatible, everything worked & detected no problems...
I still have the board here somewhere if your interested, I'd dig it out &
pull the bios from the chip, too long ago to remember which bios I used
for it..
LMK...

I find it hard to give up on a task when I take it on, & have spent more
time researching this topic...
I found a great source of information here.
Be sure to download content.zip as it contains a bunch of genuine microcodes from intel...apparently the latest releases..
These are the microcodes included

Code: Select all

       Processor                    Package         Processor    Microcode
                                                 Stepping/PKG    Update Rev

| Pentium 4 Processor               FC-PGA2         0xF13/04       0x03
| Pentium 4 Processor               FC-PGA2         0xF24/04       0x0B
| Pentium 4 Processor               FC-PGA2         0xF12/04       0x28
| Pentium 4 Processor                 OOI           0xF12/01       0x26
| Pentium 4 Processor               FC-PGA2         0xF0A/04       0x12
| Pentium 4 Processor                 OOI           0xF0A/01       0x10
| Pentium 4 Processor                 OOI           0xF07/01       0x0D
| Pentium 4 Processor  (?)            OOI (?)       0xF05/01       0x0B

| Intel Xeon Processor                OOI           0xF24/02       0x0C
| Intel Xeon Processor                OOI           0xF12/02       0x27
| Intel Xeon Processor MP             OOI           0xF11/02       0x06
| Intel Xeon Processor                OOI           0xF0A/02       0x11
| Intel Xeon Processor (?)            OOI (?)       0xF07/02       0x08
| Intel Xeon Processor (?)            OOI (?)       0xF05/02       0x0C

  Pentium III Processor              FC-PGA2        0x6B1/10       0x1C
  Pentium III Processor (?)          FC-PGA2 (?)    0x6B0/10       0x04
| Pentium III Processor (?)          FC-PGA (?)     0x696/10       0x01
  Pentium III Processor              FC-PGA         0x68A/10       0x01
  Pentium III Processor              SECC2          0x686/01       0x07
  Pentium III Processor              FC-PGA         0x686/10       0x08
| Pentium III Processor              SECC2          0x683/01       0x13
  Pentium III Processor              FC-PGA         0x683/10       0x14
  Pentium III Processor            SECC/SECC2       0x681/01       0x0D
  Pentium III Processor              FC-PGA         0x681/10       0x11
  ??????????????????????????????   SECC/SECC2 (?)   0x680/01       0x14
  Pentium III Processor            SECC/SECC2       0x673/01       0x0E
  Pentium III Processor            SECC/SECC2       0x672/01       0x10
  ??????????????????????????????   SECC/SECC2 (?)   0x671/01       0x03
  ??????????????????????????????   SECC/SECC2 (?)   0x670/01       0x06

| Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x6A4/04       0x01
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x6A1/04       0x01
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x6A0/04       0x03
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x686/04       0x02
| Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x683/04       0x10
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x681/04       0x10
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x673/04       0x2E
  Pentium III Xeon Processor          SECC          0x672/04       0x38
 #??????????????????????????????      SECC          0x671/04       0x14

  Pentium II Processor             SECC/SECC2       0x653/01       0x10
  Pentium II Processor             SECC/SECC2       0x652/01       0x2A
  Pentium II Processor             SECC/SECC2       0x651/01       0x40
  Pentium II Processor                SECC          0x650/01       0x40
  Pentium II Processor                SECC          0x634/01       0x35
 #Pentium II Processor (?)            PGA (?)       0x634/00       0x37
  Pentium II Processor                SECC          0x633/01       0x34
 #Pentium II Processor (?)            PGA (?)       0x633/00       0x36
  ??????????????????????????????      PGA (?)       0x632/00       0x20
  ??????????????????????????????      PGA (?)       0x630/00       0x13

  Pentium II Xeon Processor           SECC          0x653/04       0x0B
  Pentium II Xeon Processor           SECC          0x652/04       0x2B
 #Pentium II Xeon Processor (?)       SECC (?)      0x650/04       0x19

| Intel Celeron Processor            FC-PGA2        0xF13/04       0x03
  Intel Celeron Processor            FC-PGA2        0x6B1/10       0x1C
  Intel Celeron Processor            FC-PGA/2       0x68A/10       0x01
  Intel Celeron Processor            FC-PGA         0x686/10       0x08
  Intel Celeron Processor            FC-PGA         0x683/10       0x14
  Intel Celeron Processor             PPGA          0x665/10       0x03
  Intel Celeron Processor             SEPP          0x660/01       0x0A
  Intel Celeron Processor             SEPP          0x651/01       0x40
  Intel Celeron Processor             SEPP          0x650/01       0x40

| Mobile Pentium 4 Processor       uFC-PGA          0xF24/08       0x0D

| Mobile Pentium III Processor     uFC-PGA          0x6B1/20       0x1D
| Mobile Pentium III Processor     uFC-PGA          0x68A/80       0x05
| Mobile Pentium III Processor     Micro-PGA2       0x68A/20       0x04
| Mobile Pentium III Processor     Micro-PGA2       0x686/80       0x0C
| Mobile Pentium III Processor        MMC2          0x686/02       0x0A
  Mobile Pentium III Processor     Micro-PGA2       0x683/20       0x07
  Mobile Pentium III Processor        MMC2          0x683/08       0x08
  Mobile Pentium III Processor     Micro-PGA2       0x681/20       0x0E
  Mobile Pentium III Processor        MMC2          0x681/08       0x0F
  Mobile Pentium III Processor (?) Micro-PGA2 (?)   0x680/20       0x15
  Mobile Pentium III Processor (?)    MMC2 (?)      0x680/08       0x16

 #Mobile Pentium II Processor      Mini-Cart        0x66D/02       0x05
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor      MMC1/MMC2        0x66D/08       0x06
  Mobile Pentium II Processor      Micro-PGA1       0x66D/20       0x07
  Mobile Pentium II Processor      Mini-Cart        0x66A/02       0x0C
  Mobile Pentium II Processor      MMC1/MMC2        0x66A/08       0x0D
  Mobile Pentium II Processor      Micro-PGA1       0x66A/20       0x0B
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  Mini-Cart (?)    0x653/02       0x0C
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  MMC1/MMC2 (?)    0x653/08       0x0D
  Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  Mini-Cart (?)    0x652/02       0x2C
  Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  MMC1/MMC2 (?)    0x652/08       0x2D
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  Mini-Cart (?)    0x651/02       0x41
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  MMC1/MMC2 (?)    0x651/08       0x42
  Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  Mini-Cart (?)    0x650/02       0x41
  Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  MMC1/MMC2 (?)    0x650/08       0x45
 #Mobile Pentium II Processor (?)  Micro-PGA1 (?)   0x650/20       0x2E
 #??????????????????????????????   ??????????????   0x650/80       0x2F

| Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   uFC-PGA          0x6B1/20       0x1D
| Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   uFC-PGA          0x68A/80       0x05
| Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   Micro-PGA2       0x68A/20       0x04
| Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   Micro-PGA2       0x686/20       0x0B
  Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   MMC1/MMC2        0x66A/08       0x0D
  Mobile Intel Celeron Processor   Micro-PGA1       0x66A/20       0x0B

  Pentium II OverDrive Processor      PGA           x1632/00       0x02

  Pentium Pro Processor               PGA           0x619/00       0xD2
  Pentium Pro Processor               PGA           0x617/00       0xC6
  Pentium Pro Processor               PGA           0x616/00       0xC6
  Pentium Pro Processor               PGA           0x612/00       0xC6
 #Pentium Pro Processor (?)           PGA (?)       0x611/00       0x27


I also found the names for the genuine Intel Microcode update programs
called either checkup3.exe,for pentium pro & P2,, checkup4.exe for P2&3,, checkup5.exe again for various P2 & 3 cpus, & checkup6.exe for
P2,3&4 cpu's ,all the packages had the microcode updates & relevant
files needed to update both the bios & cpu with the microcode updates...
The latest package from intel I found could be downloaded FROM HERE

I ran it on this HP machine here that I have been attempting to make
work with the P3 cpu ,, It told me that the cpu was updated with an
update, but the bios itself could not be written to,, which would explain
why the tools that stephan_g posted above failed to work,,the bios has
some form of write protection,,yet after opening it with amibcp I found
it had the option to allow microcode update enabled by default,,I'm
wondering if it's some form of software protection in the rom itself
being that the only flash loader to successfully write to the chip when
booted to dos was the flash646 specifically used for the HP bios,,I found
no other flash loader to successfully write the chip other than to remove it & use a programmer...
For the sake of trying I used uniflash140 once, & also cleared the cmos
ram after the flash,, on rebooting the machine, all I could see was the
uniflash screen from when I flashed it,& nothing worked or booted,
as if the screenshot was somehow burned to the chip,, lucky I soldered
a socket to the board to remove the chip..

EDIT # 1:::
I contacted a bios upgrade sight - e-support.com - to see if they offered
support for a board like this one,, the response I got was they did have
one which offered this below....

The most notable features are:

Hard Drive Support up to 512GB* (48-bit Technology)
Windows XP Compliance for SP1 & SP2 (service pack)
Windows 2000 Compliance for SP3 & SP4 (service pack)
Windows ACPI 2.0* Compliance
Faster Intel and AMD CPU Upgrade Kit Support
Faster Input Output Speeds
Virtual technical support assistance
100 % Satisfaction Guarantee

Comes with this as well

I'm almost tempted to purchase it & see if by some chance there
was something I could learn from it, although knowing little about
assembly, probably not..

EDIT # 2:::
Well my perseverence has led me to find another utility to update the
microcodes, & this time it seems as though it really has updated the
microcode in the bios itself on this HP system..
I tried the ctmc utility 1st of all, which said the cpu didn't need an update
but the bios did, I then allowed it to attempt to write the bios, in which
case it said it did,, but everytime I'd reboot & follow the same procedure
it would again state the bios needed a microcode update..
I tried to use the intel utility I posted above & again it would say the bios
needed a microcode update, but would fail to write it...
However, this 3rd utility states that again the bios needed a microcode
update & said it was successful in doing so...
So, I rebooted & retried the same procedure,& this time it said the bios
didn't need a microcode update,, so I ran ctmc & the intel program
I posted above & they too stated the bios was already updated...
The bios still detects the P3 as an I(UNKNOWN) at 600mhz though...
So what I did then was stick the P2-450 back in and updated it &
ended up with the same results as above, a successful microcode
update...
So i'm guessing the microcode isn't the only update the bios needs to
correctly display the P3 cpu's on this machine...