18 Sep
2001
18 Sep
'01
5:52 a.m.
On Mon, 17 Sep 2001, Pete Turnbull wrote:
On Sep 17, 9:42, Jonathan Engdahl wrote:
Newer motherboards have at least 128K, but if you completely replace the
BIOS you will be stuck with the ugly,nasty,unportable mess of initializing
the chipset.
Have you ever soldered down a flash ROM? Not fun.
I used 36 gauge
self-strip
magnet wire and tweezers under a 40X stereoscope.
I'd rather buy one
prebuilt if available. If you build you own, it might be hard getting the
interfacing and timing compatible with DRAMs.
The ones I've seen have been regular SMD (0.5" pitch) devices which are not
too hard to do with hot air, or are ordinary DIL (0.1" pitch). The last
one I soldered was a DIL chip.
Timing might be a problem; I have almost no idea what access time DIMMs are
supposed to be but I expect it's faster than SIMMs. SIMMs are usually in
the 60ns-120ns range, and it's not too hard to get FLASH or EPROM in that
range too. You'd just need to demultiplex the addresses (latch the
addresses presented on the first part of the memory cycle). Of course,
modern motherboards use DIMMs.
Of course it would be feasible to implement a
PDP-11 emulator in the BIOS
ROM, it just would not be as fast as the one I'm thinking of. Back in the
days of QEMM/386, I remember allocating 64K for the BIOS ROM. I haven't
really looked that closely at a BIOS ROM since then. I was wondering if
modern mainboards had larger ROMs, or if they still are stuck with 64K.
I don't know for sure, but I seem to recall seeing at least 128KB. Not
megabytes, though!
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
Peter Wallace