This is old, you already published on YT! 🤣
It's always interesting to see how easy it was. Wish I had these tools 25 years ago 😀

Yeah, almost impossible to do without internet 25 years ago.
You were basically fed by PC Magazines and their CD-ROMs...

nice vid! I watched it yesterday 😀

BitsUndBolts wrote on 2022-12-03, 14:55:

2) Extract EPA Logo using CBROM
I used version 2.15 without issues, but there are reports that version 2.07 is supposed to be better and supports more BIOSes!
I have not used 2.07 myself yet. (Sorry, I don't know if I can attach CBROM in here as they may be copyrighted)

Thanks for the upload, have been searching for 1.52 and wasn't able to find it anywhere.

I've tested cbrom 2.15 with the VA503+ and the modified bios just hangs with loudspeaker noises. With cbrom 2.07 it worked like a charm.

Using paint and all tools under win9x is a great idea, i helped myself with an old version of jasc psp7 which i know from the good old days.

Reminds me of long gone days where we modified the sh*t out of our machines. 😀

I also wonder why 3 color images work. The BIOS seems to use text-mode and in textmode there's no way know to me where you can have more than 2 simultaneous colors per character (8x14 grid in this case)

Is you bios maybe a later one and not running in textmode?

EDIT:

Seems to be that Award BIOS <= 4.50 are running in textmode with EPA-Logo version 1.0 (thus the option "show grid lines") and 4.51+ are running in graphicsmode.

That's also the reason why older BIOSes fade out the logo (via palette) and newer ones don't! (i think one guy asked this on your yt-video, i'm going to post the answer there too!)

My ASUS P3B-F Rev. 1.04 has an Award 6.0 BIOS - surprisingly, it uses EPA Version 1 - the text-mode encoding.
Could be that older Award BIOSes (<4.51) fade out the logo. I don't know if I have a board with such an old BIOS version.

Interesting. I completely missed the fact that the EPA logo faded out in old BIOS versions. Throwing the switch on my old i430FX-based machine with Award 4.50G confirms this; the logo (quickly) fades out after drive detection.

A little surprise awaited when looking into the BIOS image: It does not contain a logo module at all. Instead, the EPA logo is embedded directly into the code of the system BIOS, apparently compressed using some custom RLE variant. It gets uncompressed during runtime, loaded into the video adapter as the upper half of the character set and then printed onto the screen.

Even the colors are dictated by the code: The first five lines are always shown in yellow, while the sixth line is always green. This might be a reason why the fading effect was possible: The programmers had full control of the logo, so they knew that they only had to fade two specific colors.

From a quick glance, I haven't found any hints that the BIOS would load an additional logo module at all. It might well be that these old BIOS versions cannot be modified with at custom logo(?). (At least that might be an explanation why my attempts 20 years ago were unsuccessful ...)

Edit: Looking through various CBROM versions, the first I could identify that explicitly supports EPA logos is 1.10 with a copyright year of 1997. Version 1.06 from 1996 doesn't mention EPA files.

Heey there!

I'm new here, the video is awesome and the post you made is awesome in this! Btw, I'm newbie in VOGONS as well!