P L U S A B I T --- MAthlon, DOSidle, etc.

About the BETA page:

This page is for beta testers. Any programs I link to from here are considered beta and are only to be used by beta testers! Also, beta BIOS patches can only be tested by people who own a flash writer to the specific BIOS chip or are able to do a hot-swap as the alternate repair method. I cannot risk enthusiastic people's mainboards by supplying them with beta BIOSes, as a corrupted BIOS cannot be repaired by clearing the CMOS, etc.

Anybody can beta test my programs, however. Right now, this means MAthlon, but one never knows when another program comes to life :-). (Márton Balog)

2000.08.19.

Sorry for the looooong delay, but after having returned from vacation my power supply died killing most of my computer. And I lost everything from my hard drive, which has set me back a few days :-).

Anyhow, MAthlon V3.00 [Build 250] Beta 1 is here, all in its glory (click Home above to return to the main page if you wish to download)!!! Those of you that have followed my plans "carefully" will quickly find out that I still owe you my third promise -part 3) below-. As it is not the most vital part of the program, I released V3.00 for beta testing anyway, even though it only features parts 1) and 2). The program is fully functional this way, you probably won't even miss part 3), but I will eventually finish it.

I have debugged V3.00 seriously before releasing it and I also had the opportunity to test it on an Athlon platform (ASUS K7V-T, Athlon "Classic" 1000MHz), so I really hope it is free off all bugs. Shouldn't it be, please report: (Márton Balog).

Usage: download the package from the main page using Direct Download, unzip to any folder and run MInstall.exe! You will only need a floppy disk and you are all set! Anytime you want MAthlon to configure your L2 cache, just boot with the floppy in Drive A:... (make sure your BIOS has Drive A: set as your primary boot device!) ...and upon finishing its work, MAthlon will pass control to your HDD, so your regular bootup from Drive C: will continue.

2000.07.22.

I have begun coding MAthlon V3.00. It will have the following new features:

1) An installer, which runs under MS-DOS/Windows DOS Box. The installer will create a bootable floppy, containing MAthlon V3.00. It will NOT update the HDD's Master Boot Record, because any failure could lead to complete data destruction. The installer will be window based, with help, so the MAthlon documentation will be rendered obsolete.

2) A floppy, with MAthlon being its boot sector. So anytime the user would like to boot with MAthlon, he/she just has to insert the floppy and boot. The floppy will run MAthlon to set the cache and chain to the HDD's Master Boot Record afterwards. This means, that after MAthlon is run, your normal boot would continue. So, this eliminates all previous incompatibilities with Linux, Windows NT and 2000, Windows ME, BeOS or any operating system.

3) MAthlon interface, which could be invoked when MAthlon is loading from the floppy (a message like "press CTRL + M to access MAthlon setup" would appear). You could do all MAthlon configuration from here, as well as getting info about your CPU, reading/writing and dumping MSRs, enabling/disabling L2 cache ECC, etc.

I believe I cannot get any more operating system independent than this, so expect MAthlon V3.xx to be the last series from MAthlon. If you have any tips, suggestions or comments, mail me: (Márton Balog)

2000.07.22.

My BIOS patches haven't worked out so far, so I am putting the project away for a little while. At least for the time I am developing MAthlon V3.00. I have the following motherboards "in the pipeline", however: ASUS K7M, Gigabyte 7IX-E, MSI K7Pro. Sooner or later, these mainboards should be patched. :-)

I am looking for beta testers for the 7IX-E and K7Pro BIOSes. So far, I have the following beta tester "teams":

1) ASUS K7M - Eric Franken, Tom Shaver of k7oc.com, Brian of amdworld.co.uk, Kenichi Onuki, Les Tutt, Tom Keidar.

2) Gigabyte 7IX-E - Brian of amdworld.co.uk.

3) MSI K7Pro - Nobody.

2000.07.21.

It seems that the new K7M BIOS files are also a catastrophy, as well as the 7IX-E one (but the latter needs to be confirmed for sure). Sorry, for not being able to deliver something I really hoped for and promised.