We’ve all seen the classic text splash screens on vintage VGA cards – showing the model, BIOS version, and memory count. But what if we could replace that boring text with a full-color, 256-color image?
Recently, while working with an S3 Trio 3D, I noticed something interesting about the BIOS chips. This discovery sent me down a rabbit hole involving Hex editors, Ghidra, and…
This toolkit is designed for retro-hardware enthusiasts looking to push the limits of the “World’s First 3D Decelerator”. Whether you are restoring a classic build or chasing benchmarks, these tools allow you to manipulate the raw binary data of S3 ViRGE DX/GX BIOS files. You can customize the VGA color palette for specialized displays, verify ROM integrity with the Checksum…
A few years back, I picked up a lot of 10 graphics cards on eBay for around $100. Most of them turned out to be junk—though they might make for interesting test subjects someday. But one card immediately stood out: a silver heatsink with the unmistakable shape of a 3dfx Voodoo 3! Of course, the lot was sold as untested – which, in eBay terms, means NOT WORKING! I really should have seen…
XTIDE is a BIOS extension that helps to detect hard drives and probably a lot of other devices like Compact Flash and SD-cards. After I restored a 386 board at the end of 2024, I once more was confronted with a limitation of those old systems: HDD capacity.
Many 386 and even 486 systems are limited to hard drives no larger than 500MBs. That is plenty of space for such old systems since…
During one of my adventures at the scrapyard, I picked up a 486 motherboard – the BEK-tronic BEK-V429S. As it turns out, this board had fake cache chips installed! If you want to see the full story, here is the video in which I discover that fake chips.
But how is it possible that seemingly nobody caught on and identified the fake cache earlier? The company or individual who owned…
EPROMs and EEPROMs can be programmed using a programmer like the XGecu T56 / T48 / TL866II. Unfortunately, the programmer cannot resolve the Device ID to an actual model number. The below list should aid as a lookup for anyone who needs to understand what device and model is behind a given Device ID. I also added a fuzzy search that also allows you to filter chips using regular…