On Tue, Sep 23, 2003 at 05:04:37PM -0400, Thomas Fritz wrote: > I have access to a few WBTs at a surplus place, and I've dug up the > specs on them: > > Cyrix Pentium clone - 266MHz > up to 128MB SDRAM > ports: PS/2 keyb/mouse, 2 USB 1.1, 2 serial, 1 parallel, 10/100 > ethernet, and sound in/out > > the chipset(s) include a SuperIO 97317, and a CS5530 (which handles the > soundblaster compatible sound and presumably the video).
Expect this to be a GX1+5530, or maybe even a Geode (SCx2xx) system. LinuxBIOS is running on both those platforms and there is some kind of support for the 97317 in the freebios tree, but findgrep yields nothing in freebios2, I guess it simply hasn't been ported over yet. > The board has an Award BIOS little square-like ROM, This is probably a regular flash ROM in a PLCC package. > and a larger 8MB ROM which holds Windows CE. What kind of ROM is this, exactly? Can you peel off the label and read what's printed on the chip(s)? > There are also various places on the board which could have had various > optional features, but there is no IDE, floppy, etc...but I think if I > solder on a PCI slot where it belongs I could hack some more > funtionality onto it for testing. The CS5530 and SCx2xx (which have the 5530 integrated) have IDE, but there may just not be a connector for it. The IDE pins may also be multiplexed away for some other use in this particular system. > I've been thinking of how to go about hacking this thing, and the > easiest method I'd like to try first: Burning a new ROM to replace the > Windows CE version. I doubt this thing would be easy to flash the BIOS, > if it even had that capability. Maybe, maybe not. With a little luck the HW designers have wired the flash memory to always be writable, given the right software commands of course. > I'm not looking for graphics, a text screen will be more than sufficient. Either should be possible. > On this, I have two questions: What's my chances for success (educated > guesses?), and has anyone done something similar? I'd say you'll succeed given time, you will have to learn the quirks of this particular system and then likely make a port of freebios2 to it. These two processes are usually concurrent. If it's an SCx2xx system, check out the nano stuff in the freebios tree, and port it to freebios2. :) //Peter _______________________________________________ Linuxbios mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.clustermatic.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxbios