Win3x.Org

Hi!

Another board with a matching manual from my shoebox. I think this is a new one.

Manufacturer name:
Chicony

Motherboard name:
P9M25C-7HB Rev. R1M0

Motherboard schema:
Baby AT

Supported memory:
Max 8MB SIMM

Supported CPUs:
386sx 20MHz

Photo(s) of the motherboard:
Manual(s):
Motherboard BIOS(es):
http://westarps.de/temp/PpmUy2sbApBdRG2 ... 20R1M0.zip

BIOS-ID:
30-0300-ZZ1116-00101111-050591-SUN3-SX-8

Note: Came with 5.25" 360k EMS driver disk. The disk contains two files: EMS driver and sample CONFIG.SYS. Both are in the ZIP. Someone desoldered the battery back in the day. (Slight burn marks visible.) It was probably the same person who wrote "CHICONY" on the cover of the manual. BIOS ID confirms it. I wonder what the big fat "GSS" on the PCB stands for?

I think it's a match http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/3538

I thought so, too at first. But the 8-bit ISA slot is in the wrong position and there are several Jumpers missing (or undocumented) on the Magitronics. Also JP7 seems to select color / mono on both boards but it is an ON/OFF configuration on the Chicony and 1-2/2-3 on the Magitronics.

Well in this case it's your manual that doesn't match the 8bit ISA placement because your photo matches the ISA slot layout

Manuals and also MTL wasn't always 100% accurate so mistakes might have been made. Some rev variation may have happened too (perhaps JP8's pin 3 connects to nothing ? meaning that 2-3 or off is the same)

You are right. Also, the display adapter select on my actual board does have three pins. As opposed to the info in the manual.

How do you deal with such cases? My board is obviously by Chicony (BIOS ID string). And the fact that it was probably sold under two brand names (and the manual... and the BIOS image...) give it provenance. Right? Would be a shame to just discard that knowledge IMO.

In my opinion it's just a matter of board revision, reseller, inaccuracy, etc.

Looking at your motherboard you can see that even the 8 bit slot could have been a 16 bit one if they wanted to.

We've seen that many times before actually ^^
An example of that can be seen here http://www.win3x.org/uh19/motherboard/show/919

This is a BCM SQ599. But in TH99 it was named differently (you can see it in the MTL manual). But that other name was just the reseller's name, so we replaced it with the actual name.

I even have a motherboard that had the schema totally wrong and some settings were bad too (the spot where the CPU is on the PCB was said to be the Keyboard controller, a part of the chipset was described as the CPU, the jumper settings for the RAM were wrong ...) And yes it was really the right board. Just really poorly documented.

I think the way they worked at Microhouse is that they bought mostly manuals, made their own. But humans being humans, they made some mistakes, wrong assumptions, etc. Since we took their place we have to fix their problems.

I think think I'm going to rename this board as chicony and perhaps keep the old name as an alias.

Sounds good!

I think it's really sad that hardware from that era is often "faceless" and difficult to identify. I have many ISA cards in my collection that do not have any kind of identification attached whatsoever. Sometimes not even an FCC-ID. Probably a result of the fact that systems from that era were usually not self-built but came from numerous manufacturers. Which just bought "faceless" parts and probably even didn't want them to be identifiable. 286 boards are notorious in that respect.

A stark contrast to today where GPUs etc. are encased and labeled like sports cars.

Indeed.

This is one of the many reasons that motivated me to initiate this project. However we don't have expansion cards yet.

It's online on the page I gave earlier !
This thread should be kept though for its chipset drivers because we don't have that kind of thing ready right now

I'm going to remove the file above in a couple of days since it's in a temporary directory. All files can be found here:

https://archive.org/details/EMSDRV