FIC PA-2007 (ViA Apollo VP2/97)

Well, this page contains (probably) useless UNDOCUMENTED information about the VP2/97 board. It is here just to remind me about my painful experience... I should have dumped it by now, but it's a good board: it DOES take 75MHz FSB, and it DOES have the 5.5x clock multiplier. Anyway...

First of all, despite its documentation says, this board seems to not recognize the SST flash BIOS. Upon boot, it always appears the "Unknown flash type" message. And believe me, I flashed it a thousand times. I became an expert in hot-flashing, and like my best friend said once: "I could write a book about it".

That message was really annoying, but that was not all. Every time, and I mean, every time I reset my computer, it entered some sort of stand-by mode, and POST sequence never began. Now *THAT* was a problem. I like to write system software just for fun, and you know, spurious system rebooting is very common during testing.

So, having such long experience in (hot-)flashing, during my 666-th (just kidding) flash session, I noticed that my computer resets OK after using UNIFLASH. Starting and exiting UNIFLASH every time I reset my computer was not an option, especially with EMM386, so I decided to analyze that program closer. Having the sourcecode (thanks, guys), I isolated a small portion which reset the ROM BIOS. Then I wrote a small executable that did the job. But not entirely...

You see, the executable refused to run under EMM386. Of course, because it used some weird (!) "real flat" mode which was incompatible with V86. Then I came to the conclusion that a device driver could do. Now you might think that's the end. Uhmmm... NO! I also run Linux on my machine, therefore, I need a kernel module. And guess what? I wrote one, too.

The VP2 hack is available here, in all flavors (COM, SYS, LKM).