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Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

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Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#51

Post by avian »

Crinus wrote: post #49
duxup wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember some of those old BIOSs that were quite UI involved. I always thought "This is really neat... not sure it was worth the effort for a BIOS..." Granted in those days users were more likely to be in the BIOS to do something than today.

Yet, the BIOSes both of the last motherboards i bought (one recently, another 3-4 years ago) had some very elaborate UIs, with skinned menus, star backgrounds and a bunch of other frivolous stuff. I think one even had some sort of background ambient sound. Keeping with tradition though, the "help" screens of every option was as helpful as the "help" screens of my 386DX, Pentium MMX and Athlon64 desktops of decades pr…

I think I still have somewhere a pile of paper booklets that came with old motherboards that have similarly unhelpful descriptions of various settings.

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#52

Post by Narishma »

avian wrote: post #25
TheAdamist wrote: post #21

>"Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think". That is a pretty misleading title to me, it sounds like they discovered many bios's have embedded windows 3.1 to run the user interface. Instead its about someone purposefully loading windows 3.1 onto their bios flash chip, and how they made it functional. "How i embedded windows 3.1 into my bios" or something would be a more descriptive title. edit: Or even…

I seem to remember that Compaq business PCs in the late 1990s/early 00s had BIOS/NVRAM setup that looked suspiciously like a customized build of Windows 3.1. You held ESC or something during boot and you got a mouse-driven interface to set various hardware settings. I remember it being quite the contrast to the more common text-mode menu based BIOS setups. I never looked into it whether it was actually in ROM/Flash o…

They just skinned their BIOS interface to look superficially like Windows 3.1.

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#54

Post by Narishma »

mtrower wrote: post #30
fb03 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, wow, I've never heard of this. Do you have a link of this phenomena?

Don't know about the 486 specifically, but this sort of thing wasn't unheard of. I have a pentium-era machine with 8MB EDO built into the board. It can stand alone or complement whatever you put in your DRAM slots (though curiously, if you max it out at 4x32MB, you get 128MB, not the 136MB you might hope for...) Edit: wait... I thought we were talking about something unusual because he mentioned SIMMs, and the 486 sp…

That's not what this is about. OP is talking about booting with just the external L2 cache (which I've seen vary from 64KB to 256KB) when no RAM SIMMs are plugged in.

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#56

Post by DowsingSpoon »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #8
DowsingSpoon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter. (Except when the original source is not casually consumable without the context, but the original post is quite readable.)

Thank you! I did not know.

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#57

Post by laumars »

TheAdamist wrote: post #21

>"Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think". That is a pretty misleading title to me, it sounds like they discovered many bios's have embedded windows 3.1 to run the user interface. Instead its about someone purposefully loading windows 3.1 onto their bios flash chip, and how they made it functional. "How i embedded windows 3.1 into my bios" or something would be a more descriptive title. edit: Or even…

I know criticising submission titles is a meme on here but it would be nice if the top comment on a pretty interesting hack was about that pretty interesting hack.

Going on topic for a moment. I love the concept behind this project. I wonder if you could fit Linux + busybox on there (I haven't run the numbers but I'd expect it wouldn't be possible)

Re: Windows 3.1 in my BIOS? It's more likely than you think

#60

Post by mtrower »

Narishma wrote: post #54
mtrower wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't know about the 486 specifically, but this sort of thing wasn't unheard of. I have a pentium-era machine with 8MB EDO built into the board. It can stand alone or complement whatever you put in your DRAM slots (though curiously, if you max it out at 4x32MB, you get 128MB, not the 136MB you might hope for...) Edit: wait... I thought we were talking about something unusual because he mentioned SIMMs, and the 486 sp…

That's not what this is about. OP is talking about booting with just the external L2 cache (which I've seen vary from 64KB to 256KB) when no RAM SIMMs are plugged in.

So the cache can stand in for main memory when none was present? I'd be interested to see the implementation details, but alas, I must be going about my search wrong =(

Will have to look into it more when I have some more time.

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