ancient speech synthesizers

[Marcel Oats]

Most Mbs now have the BPB (bios parameter block) stored outside the 
actual file that makes the bios.  Normally, the bios file that you 
can save, should be around 512 kb in size.  If we're going to get 
into a discussion on accessing bios technology, we might want to take 
it off-list, but I believe you would still be faced with the issue of 
different mb manufacturers using different formats.  Indeed, Asus 
(the maker of the board on all systems here accept for the server) 
use a completely different bpb format to Gigabyte.

Ideally, as mentioned earlier, it'd be a case of manufactures writing 
a utility, or perhaps a third party writing the skeleton, and the 
manufacturers writing templates to fit into the infrastructure.

Marcel
At 11:21 Ay M 13/10/2006, you wrote:
>I seem to have a memory of some manufacturers stating in sales information
>that their MBs come with software to change bios settings from windows. I
>think it might have been Gigabyte. Doing some checking now, I can find a
>Gigabyte board that allows altering boot order without accessing BIOS
>directly (the board I am mentioning here can be found at www.dabs.com with
>quicklink 43rtws). Also the BIOS can be accessed from windows, and has been
>for a long time, my asus p4pe MB came with software that could save BIOS to
>a file, or flash BIOS from a file, from in windows, so an app wouldn't even
>need to work directly on the BIOS hardware if the file format was known
>(you would hope the manufacturer would know that).
>
>From
>Michael Whapples
>
>Farhan writes:
>
> > HI, i'm not sure if this applies to the current conversation 
> here, but an interesting note.
> > Toshiba makes a bios utility for windows you can read everything 
> with in the bios, change the boot order and all that. I'm not sure 
> how you could actually program one of those for LInux, but maybe 
> you could contact Toshiba and talk to thems.
> > On 10/12/2006 at 4:41 Gregory Nowak said
> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> > Hash: SHA1
> >
> > On Thu, Oct 12, 2006 at 07:21:04PM +1300, Marcel Oats wrote:
> >> The other think we could
> >> think about, are why companies such as Asus have not made a 
> piece of windows
> >> software that is able to read the bios parameter block on their
> >> boards, and allow the user to change them, in a nice accessible
> >> interface.
> >
> > Why limit it to Asus, why not ask the same thing of all companies
> > producing motherboards and bios code? Actually, I think that if AMI
> > and Award were to include it in the base bios, the mb companies
> > probably wouldn't pull it out.
> >
> > \as for the why, I'm willing to bet that it's because they don't care,
> > because they think the RND would be too expensive, and probably
> > because these companies think the market for something like this is
> > too small. Granted, something like this wouldn't probably cost too
> > much to develop. While we're discussing things to think about, if such
> > a utility were developed, it would be nice to find it on the CD that
> > comes with the mb, instead of having to pay for yet another program,
> > because you have a disability, and most other people don't. Oh one
> > more thing, let's not limit it to windows, arguably, I think such a
> > utility would be easier to program as a gnu/linux text-based
> > application, though since I haven't done hardware driver programming
> > under gnu/linux, I could be wrong in my estimate of the difficulty level.
> >
> > Greg
> >
> >
> >
> > - --
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