Hope springs eternal - PowerLeap and the sy-6bb
Commodore B. Mike
willing and able to match their older BX motherboards with a
Coppermine brain. The fact that it was not technically possible (??)
to do so with the 6BB led to confusion and a sense of betrayal.
We, by our nature as trailing-edge BABY-AT SY-6BB owners, adhere to a
tradition of thrift and value-oriented foresight.
Who cares about the sex-appeal in so-called "modern" motherboards?
Why should we abandon our vast array of $5 Thrift-Store-Obtained
BABY-AT 350w (!!!) powersupplies and monster boxes!?!? Why should we
heed the call of "modern" memory-technologies and dump our SDRAM?
Small real-world improvements are not Enough justification to keep the
Resellers in business!!
We put our faith in the CPU, the blessed icon of technological
achievement!
Therefore, we who retain the glorious SY-6BB are rooting for the
Powerleap Tualatin-BX solution to deliver us to the promised land.
XmX
John Howland
chip is not large enough to hold the extra code needed. I see no way that
Powerleap can get around that limitation.
There comes a time when you need to upgrade more then one component... the
6BB was never designed to accept products that were not part of Intel's
design spec.'s at the time it was designed.
--
---------------
Specialty Tech - Main Boards, CPU, Memory and more...
Lake Forest, Calif. (949) 951-7067
www.specialtytech.com
---------------
Commodore B. Mike <xmi...@eyrie.org> wrote in message
news:19f513da.01111...@posting.google.com...
Commodore B. Mike
> One major issue in using the Coppermine P3 on the 6BB is that the BIOS
> chip is not large enough to hold the extra code needed. I see no way that
> Powerleap can get around that limitation.
>
> There comes a time when you need to upgrade more then one component... the
> 6BB was never designed to accept products that were not part of Intel's
> design spec.'s at the time it was designed.
>
Back in the days when few were afraid of hardware and opcodes:
0) Before you do anything, you find an insider with SOYO / Intel
engineering manuals, specs, and ... BIOS source code.. :)
1) You write a small bootstrap BIOS with enough intelligence to open a
storage device (HD, etc) and load the full BIOS from the device.
2) You write as much of the BIOS as you can on the chip and bridge the
remainder from a file (storage device, etc) into ram.
3) You recode the BIOS to eliminate "unnecessary code" and destroy all
intel specs in the process.. This would probably cause lots of
problems. :)
4) You recode the BIOS as follows : one part decompressor/loader, the
rest gets stored under compression on the chip.. but this is what is
probably done now..
I believe that some 6bb competitors (BX chipset) were able to run
coppermine with a simple BIOS upgrade. Should SOYO be expected to be
clairvoyant? Not sure, but the competition (Abit!) appeared to have
had a better handle on the "future" at that time ??
I suppose I have no real need to upgrade. I'd like to for the
"thrill" of doing it. The BX chipset is still quite solid and stable.
Sadly, I do not believe I will choose SOYO in the future.
XmX