Home made bios hotflasher made on the cheap...

Discusses BIOS flashers and utilities from Award, AMI and Uniflash
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KenH
Chip off the ol' block
Posts: 110
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 7:11 pm

I figured on sharing a gem of an idea I found some time ago, regarding PC-Partner & Octek motherboards from the 1998 to 2001 period, {though i'm sure "most" Octek
boards are just re-branded PC-Partner boards anyway}..
All boards I've found that were manufactured by these 2 companies, seem to always have a variety of voltage settings via "JP8 & JP15" jumpers, 2 lots of 3, & in some cases 1 lot of 3
& 1 lot of 4 pin jumpers, used for flashing the many varieties of chips these companies must have used at one time or another during each motherboards release...

The one thing that makes these boards ever so usefull, is that they make perfect hot-flashing devices for any dip {or plcc chip via the use of a 32pin dip to plcc adaptor}...
Any chip after the 27XXXXX part numbered 5 or 12 volt chip that is, the chips meant to run on the boards with firmware hubs don't work as it seems, even with a firmware
hub adaptor unfortunately, though I wouldn't try it without the hub adaptor either way, wrong voltage otherwise...
I have a collection of old socketed 810 chipset boards for that purpose as most 810 chipset boards seem to have firmware hubs anyway...

I've made some tools mostly from trashed motherboards & figured on showing them giving others the idea of having a go themselves, the only parts I had to buy was the 32pin dip
chip mount, some PCB stripboard, a 32pin dip to plcc adaptor, & some .031" brass rod...

The motherboard I used in this pic was an Octek Rhino VAP 133S-ACP, which originally had the JP8 jumpers for chip selection, but had the JP15 jumpers left off the board, I tested the blank
soldered areas where the JP15 jumpers would have normally been soldered to, & found they were definately conected to other areas of the board, so I added the pins to the board, & found
they definately did indeed work, it was needed to correctly detect the 1 & 2mb intel chips, & 1mb MX chips, without JP15 jumpers the chips wouldn't detect at all, though most "earlier boards
have both JP8 & 15 already soldered onto these boards...

There are other boards on the market which had jumpers for 12v & 5v chips, though I never did find one that detected & flashed ALL chips successfully like these Pc-Partner/Octek boards
with the extra jumpers...

You'll notice in the pics below, I actually desoldered the original pins, & added some new .031" dia - 2" long pins for easy access, & even added a switch to JP8...

The cable used was just a 34pin floppy cable, & had every second pair twisted for correct pin connection from chip mount to chip socket on board...
The connectors were just the 34pin sockets removed from trashed boards, & adding any missing pins there may have been...

Took one full day to make, & I have to say, I have a willem pcb3b programmer, & the latest GQ-4X willem programmer, yet I can flash a chip on this hotflasher & shutdown again in less
time than it takes to boot windows & connect the willem programmers...

I originally made it with 12" of floppy cable, & found there was always problems with parts of the chip not programming properly, I kept trimming the length of cable until I found there
was no problems ever programming any chip, 6" was the longest length for successful flashing, so I trimmed it again to 5" to make sure...

The last 2 photo's here is showing uniflash flashing a 4mb 29F040 plcc chip no problems, via a $7.00 dip32 to plcc32 pin willem adaptor bought from ebay...


Though without uniflash it would never have even been an option to make this from the start...
Many thanks to the creators of uniflash..!

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Last edited by KenH on Wed Mar 10, 2010 3:38 am, edited 1 time in total.
Denniss
BIOS Guru
Posts: 3153
Joined: Thu Mar 21, 2002 8:16 pm
Location: Near Hannover (CEBIT) Germany
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I use an Asus P2L97 Slot-1 board to flash all available 32-pin 1 MBit (128 Kib) Flashroms, even the sometimes tricky 12V Intel and MXIC/H.T. flashroms.
I have an Asus P2B to do the same with 2 MBit (256 KiB) Flashroms.
I believe I have an i810 motherboard for some earlier firmware hub flashies.
KenH
Chip off the ol' block
Posts: 110
Joined: Wed Mar 30, 2005 7:11 pm

Yeah same here, I had 3 systems setup down the back of the workshop for flashing the different chips, though after discovering this trick on the PC-Partner/Octek
boards, I've cut it down to 2, & just keep a jumper picture handy for the different chips on this one Octek board...
I had one of the 3 also dual booting into Win98 & XP for use on the Willem programmers, I can still do this on this one Octek board seeing it's a 1gig P3...
Managed to save some space on the bench down the back too...

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