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Hardware I.P.B. 4158 9th November 1995 (JW)
Department Category Implementation
Hardware Firmware Advisory
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Jade & Ruby ROM BIOS upgrading

There appears to be a lot of confusion with flashing the BIOS on Jade and Ruby based machines. The BIOS ROM in Jade & Ruby based machines is a flash device and is upgraded (flashed) via software in-situ.

There are three possible installed flash BIOS ROMs, which are as follows:

AMD Am29F010
AMD Am29F020
AMD Am29F040

If you have a Ruby based system (RG, RH), then the flash BIOS ROM will be one of the first two types, whereas Jade systems (RE, RF) could be any of the three.

The only difference between the three version of the BIOS ROM when upgrading is that the AMD Am29F040 requires an offset parameter entered into the command line of JFLASH.EXE.

The current self unpacking archive file in Area 43 on the Apricot Insight BBS is CRJ406.EXE. This contains a batch file called FLASH.BAT which makes it easier for the user to detect which version of BIOS ROM is installed in the machine, and will automatically put in the correct offset parameter if the AMD Am29F040 is selected. If you follow the instructions in FLASH.BAT you shouldn't have any troubles upgrading the BIOS.

Care however must be taken when flashing the BIOS on a Jade or Ruby system, as selecting the wrong BIOS option will permanently damage your BIOS, and will result in your motherboard being inoperative until the BIOS chip is replaced, so if you are not sure what to do, contact Apricot Technical Support for further advice.

IMPORTANT NOTES

This program will not function under Windows so ensure you boot the machine in DOS mode (not loading any TSRs).

Before running FLASH.BAT ensure that the Flash ROM program jumper (J3 on motherboard) is set to Write Enable.

If any third party video cards are installed in the machine (e.g. Matrox PCI) then remove them and use the onboard video connector, failure to do so will result in no screen display after the upgrade.

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Computing for a Connected World