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Software Vault: The Gold Collection
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Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO
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P5UTL006.TIP
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1993-06-01
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If you're having a hardware or software problem with your
system, you often need to know who made your BIOS and when
they made it. Your manual should have this information, but
it's not always there and not always easy to locate. The
BIOS date is usually displayed when you boot up, but having
to reboot to get this information makes little sense. That's
why I wrote ROMINFO.BAS, which displays the copyright
notice, date, and machine ID type embedded in the ROM BIOS
without a reboot. ROMINFO also displays the probable type of
system based on the machine ID byte. ROMINFO.BAS is written
for DOS 5.0's QBasic, but you can easily modify it for
BASICA and GW-BASIC by replacing the SELECT...CASE
statements with IF...THEN statements. The program looks for
the ID byte at address F000:FFFE, the copyright notice
starting at F000:0 (the beginning of the ROM BIOS), and the
ROM date beginning at address F000:FFF5. These addresses are
used by almost all major ROM manufacturers, although some,
such as DTK, don't place copyright information at the
beginning. In that case, all you see on the screen for that
information is garbage characters, or nothing at all,
depending on what happens to be at that address.
Vincent D. O'Connor
Babbitt, Minnesota
Editor's Note: This program will virtually always find the
BIOS release date and the machine type, but the absence of
the copyright notice is not necessarily the fault of the
manufacturer. For instance, I use the QEMM-386 memory
manager, which maps the F000:FFF5 area out of memory
entirely. To read the copyright notice, I had to temporarily
remove QEMM -- a trick that may work for you if you have the
same problem. ROMINFO.BAS is in the P5UTL directory of your
PowerBase *.* Volume 5 diskette. To run it, enter the
command QBASIC /RUN ROMINFO at the DOS prompt while in the
same directory as ROMINFO.BAS.
Title: Reading Your ROM
Category: UTL
Issue Date: July, 1992
Editor: Brett Glass
Supplementary Files: P5UTL\ROMINFO.BAS
Filename: P5UTL006.TIP