soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page

Welcome to soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page!

Please take the time to dig and crawl through soggi.org - it's worth it, if you're interested in legacy/retro/vintage hardware and software! There are lots of BIOSes, firmware, drivers, manuals, patches, tools, utilities, tech demos, other downloads and specifications available.

Though this website mainly covers the topics mentioned above, it also contains some other content which is just distantly related to them. For example there is some information about Karl Koch alias Hagbard Celine or how to block bad bots like Diffbot from your website.


2024/02/25 - soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW08/2024

This week's soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch is much longer and at the same time it is the farewell from this format. The farewell, 30 years of robots exclusion standard and - of course - new downloads including roytam1's latest browser builds are the topics.

Read more: soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW08/2024


2024/02/18 - soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW07/2024

This week's soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch is very short as it contains only a few new downloads.

Read more: soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW07/2024


2024/02/11 - soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW06/2024

This week's soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch is the third one and again is a bit short as it contains just roytam1's new browser builds and other new downloads.

Read more: soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW06/2024


2024/02/04 - soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW05/2024

This week's soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch is the second one and is a bit short as it contains just roytam1's new browser builds and other new downloads.

Read more: soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW05/2024


2024/01/28 - soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW04/2024

This is the first soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch as announced on 2023/12/31. Within this (usually) weekly planned category of news important news, new downloads, accidentally found interesting things and other stuff will find a place.

Read more: soggi.org Sunday news and webwatch CW04/2024


2023/12/31 - Short sign of life from soggi.org

After more than two and a half years here's a short sign of life from soggi.org!

The last years weren't the best and easiest in my life - especially the passing of my dad in 2020 and the passing of a good friend in 2017 got me down, but also CORONA / SARS-CoV-2 and its consequences, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the 2023 Israel-Hamas war. In addition I worked more than ever before the last three years, since this year even in four shifts.

Read more: Short sign of life from soggi.org


2021/06/13 - soggi.org has been mentioned on Hacker News

Yesterday in the afternoon I took a look into the Matomo statistics and really got surprised by the over 1,200 visitors in the last 24 hours - usually there are something like 400-800, recently barely ~500 a day. After having a deeper look into this it turned out that somebody mentioned soggi.org on Hacker News on 2021/06/11 and a lot of additional visitors came in.

Read more: soggi.org has been mentioned on Hacker News


2020/07/25 - v0.97 beta R1

This update is dedicated to my father, my dad - he sadly passed away in May 2020 at the age of 64. His very sudden death was a shock. Thanks to all the relatives and friends for being at his funeral. Dad, we miss you so much! R.I.P. - requiescat in pace - rest in peace.

It took a while for the step to the latest (re-)incarnation of soggi.org but here it is. Many additions, changes and fixes have been made - on the content side this update focuses on a lot of new (old) video card tech demos, tools and 3dfx patches / game patches. Hopefully you enjoy the improvements and the new content!

Unfortunately there's some trouble with the hoster's anti-virus software - see Third.

First the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) / COVID-19 days aren't over, unfortunately - stay at home and practice "social distancing" as far as possible and as long as you can to flatten the curve! Please wear a mouth-nose protection in the public, at least. Stay healthy!
BTW soggi.org doesn't support any kind of conspiracy theory bullshit - seriously!

Second this major update replaces all .zip downloads with .7z archives because .7z containers using LZMA2 algorithm provide a significant higher compression rate in the most cases - 7-Zip (Windows), p7zip (Linux/Unix) and Keka (macOS) are recommended for unpacking (see tools).

Third the hoster's (ALL-INKL.COM) anti-virus software (ClamAV) makes some trouble - it detected some files as malware/virus, therefore just deleted them and notification mails were sent by the hoster. One file is the game patch Max Payne 2 v1.01 (also see the virustotal scan) - it should be part of the new content within this update.
These are definitely so-called "false positives" as no other anti-virus software detects them or the wrong detection has been removed from their software by "false positive" request, respectively. Initially the hoster was contacted but the rapid answer stated to post a request at ClamAV's Report False Positive page. Several requests via various e-mail addresses were made in the last months - but ClamAV didn't answer, to none of them.
Nothing, Zero, Nada, Niente, NULL! Heaven only knows what's wrong with ClamAV, rarely saw such a poor support - all other anti-virus software distributors like AVG, Avira, Kaspersky, Microsoft and some others replied to a false positive submission, at least within a few days.

Fourth the alpha / test version status of soggi.org has been removed due to the long stability of this page - the project should now be mature enough to give it a beta status.

Fifth some scene news which also concern soggi.org:

  1. Another good old hardware news and reviewing site has stopped publishing in March 2019 - www.hardocp.com ([H]ard|OCP) has been mothballed and the The Final Bottom Line has been written by the owner Kyle Bennett after more than two decades of service. Since autumn 2019 www.hardocp.com redirects to the [H]ardForum which will persist, fortunately - operation is said to be funded through Patreon.

  2. At the beginning of the last year (2019) also the Polish hardware site FrazPC (www.frazpc.pl) has been shut down.

  3. The German licensee of Tom's Hardware emancipated itself to igor’sLAB, the old content has gone. The domain www.tomshardware.de redirects to www.tomshardware.com, www.tomshw.de rediretcs to www.igorslab.de.

  4. At the beginning of the last year (2019) Foxconn's product and support websites (www.foxconnchannel.com and www.foxconnsupport.com) have been shut down.

  5. In late summer 2019 FIC shut down its FTP server (ftp.fic.com.tw). In addition all information about motherboards and other hardware has been removed from FIC's website.

  6. AOpen removed all the older content from their website. Though their FTP server ftp.aopen.com is still online, the old stuff (pre 2019) has been already removed, but has been readded recently.

All links to [H]ard|OCP, FrazPC and Tom's Hardware (DE) reviews on motherboard spec pages have been replaced by appropriate Wayback Machine links, if available. More AOpen / FIC / Foxconn BIOSes and manuals may be integrated in the future on soggi.org.

Sixth full changelog:


2020/03/27 - CORONA - stay at home and flatten the curve with social distancing

The novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) causes the ongoing pandemic disease called COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) and forces us to keep ourselves away from other humans (so-called "social distancing") and to stay at home to flatten the curve - at least in our free time, if you still go to work.

Read more: CORONA - stay at home and flatten the curve with social distancing


2019/12/03 - CPUID CPU-Z Vintage Edition 1.01

CPUID expresses it's love to the retro/vintage computer scene - their hardware information tool CPU-Z has been released as a so-called "Vintage Edition" in version 1.01.

The CPU-Z Vintage Edition is a version especially for Win95/98/98SE/ME with focus on old processors and motherboard chipsets from 386's to 686's generation. CPUID celebrates CPU-Z's 20th birthday with this special release.

CPU-Z Vintage Edition is freeware and works on Windows 95 and above.

new features:

New (old) logos have been also added to the Vintage Edition (see the news linked below).

CPUID news: CPU-Z Vintage Edition
download  : www.cpuid.com
more tools: misc/tools


2019/11/24 - New article: Foxconn N15235 motherboard / video card

Often the marking N15235 on a motherboard or video card from Foxconn is mistakenly deemed to be the model number. Find out how to determine the product's real model number and/or name.

Read more: Foxconn N15235 motherboard / video card


2019/06/04 - v0.96 alpha R2a test version

This is "just" a security, privacy and bug fix update.

As you know, soggi.org respects your privacy and uses c't Shariff from c't/heise online, a solution to embed social media share buttons without leaking personal data of all visitors. The previously installed version was affected by a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the twitter service and therefor has been replaced by the latest one to preserve security.

Since late 2018 Facebook adds unique identifiers - "Facebook Client ID" (fbclid) - as a query string to the URL of an outgoing link by clicking it. So Facebook users can be tracked better then ever before when they are surfing to other websites. This (U)ID infringes the privacy of Facebook users and bothers webmasters by distorting their website's statistics - thus the "fbclid" is a violation of soggi.org's strict privacy policy and will be removed from any URL as of now by an additional code snippet on the server side.

thx @ParanoidPenguin.net - How to remove Facebook's fbclid parameter using mod_rewrite....

Short list of all changes:


2019/05/24 - Karl Koch alias Hagbard Celine - 30th anniversary of death

30 years ago - on May 23/24 1989 - the German computer hacker Karl Koch alias "Hagbard Celine" from Hanover, which was one of the hackers who did the so-called "KGB hack", died under mysterious circumstances at the age of 23. Karl Koch's completely charred body was found in a forest and his death was officially claimed to be a self-immolation/suicide, but the circumstances of his death weren't clarified completely.

Read more: Karl Koch alias Hagbard Celine - 30th anniversary of death


2018/12/31 - v0.96 alpha R2 test version


2018/06/29 - v0.96 alpha R1 test version

Next big step has been taken - soggi.org is now reachable via HTTPS/TLS (thx to Let's Encrypt). For legacy reasons access via HTTP is still possible.


2018/03/12 - v0.95 alpha R1 test version - soggi.eu moved to soggi.org

On 5 March 2018 soggi.eu - aka "soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page" - went offline and finally moved to soggi.org on 12 March 2018.

Read more: soggi's BIOS & Firmware Page moved from soggi.eu to soggi.org

As a side effect there is a premature update which originally was planned for some day in the future. It adds a lot of content, increases quality, contains some restructuring for better orientation and among others introduces a strict privacy policy. As a result there can be some bugs or flaws (missing files/dead links, wrong information and so on). Be careful and have fun!


2017/05/14 - WannaCry Ransomware: Patch released for Microsoft Windows XP, Server 2003 and 8

Microsoft has released a patch for the older, unsupported versions of its operating system - Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP x64 Edition, Windows XP Embedded (Windows XP for XPe), Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 x64 Edition and Windows 8. The security update covers the vulnerabilities used by the WannaCry malware/worm/ransomware to launch a worldwide massive cyber attack starting on 12 May 2017.

Read more: WannaCry Ransomware: Patch released for Microsoft Windows XP, Server 2003 and 8


2017/02/17 - New article: Diffbot - blocking bad bot and rude content scraper from websites

Diffbot is a commercial web crawler (bot/spider) which ruthlessly scrapes the content of websites, forms some structured data out of it and makes money that way. This rude content scraper is a bad bot because it doesn't obey robots.txt and hides it self as a human visitor with spoofed/fake user agents.

Read more: Diffbot - blocking bad bot and rude content scraper from websites


2016/10/31 - v0.94 alpha R5 test version


2016/06/27 - Iceland v England 2-1 - UEFA Euro 2016 - Brexit completed

OK, obviously this has nothing to do with motherboards, drivers and BIOS...but it's completely unbelievable - Iceland beats England, also called Three Lions, with 2-1 in round of 16 at UEFA Euro 2016, the European Football Championship - England, motherland of football, completed the so called Brexit.

Read more: Iceland v England 2-1 - UEFA Euro 2016 - Brexit completed


2016/06/22 - v0.94 alpha R4 test version


2016/06/15 - v0.94 alpha R3 test version


2016/06/05 - New article: MSI N1996 motherboard / video card / ODD

Often the marking N1996 on a motherboard, video card or ODD from MSI is mistakenly deemed to be the model number. Find out how to determine the product's real model number and/or name.

Read more: MSI N1996 motherboard / video card / ODD


2016/06/05 - New article: Intel Indeo video/audio codec

Through the 1990s the Intel Indeo codec was very popular, many computer video games and other software utilised it to encode their videos.

Read more: Intel Indeo video/audio codec


2016/05/27 - soggi.eu retro hardware community and advertisement

While this page grows up I'm thinking about adding a community to the page. Another thought is adding some advertisement to refinance the costs for running the page.

Read more: soggi.eu retro hardware community and advertisement


2016/05/19 - www.motherboards.org hacked by 9anoufa / "Moroccan Revolution Team"

In the night from May 18 to May 19, 2016 the well known motherboard website www.motherboards.org has been "hacked"/defaced. The replacement claims this was done by the "Moroccan Revolution Team", but this can be doubted.

Read more: www.motherboards.org hacked by 9anoufa / "Moroccan Revolution Team"


2016/04/27 - v0.94 alpha R2 test version


2016/04/19 - v0.94 alpha R1 test version


2016/01/07 - New article: Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 Update-Hack for Windows XP

Windows XP reached end of mainstream support on April 14, 2009 - no new features were added after this date. Extended support, which included only security updates, has ended on April 8, 2014. Excluded from that, embedded versions of Windows XP have other support lifecycles and Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 reaches end of extended support last, on April 9, 2019.

Read more: Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 Update-Hack for Windows XP


2015/12/31 - 7-Zip 15.14

After five years the file archiving tool 7-Zip has been released in a new stable version, version 15.14. 7-Zip is a open source file archiver programmed by Igor Pavlov. If you like 7-Zip, you can donate via paypal.

7-Zip works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

Sadly, new versions of 7-Zip don't work on Win9x/NT4 anymore. The last stable version for Win9x and NT4 (9.20) can be downloaded under misc/tools.

changelog:

download / website: www.7-zip.org


2015/11/21 - 7-Zip 15.12

After five years the file archiving tool 7-Zip has been released in a new stable version, version 15.12. 7-Zip is a open source file archiver programmed by Igor Pavlov. If you like 7-Zip, you can donate via paypal.

7-Zip works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

Sadly, new versions of 7-Zip don't work on Win9x/NT4 anymore. The last stable version for Win9x and NT4 (9.20) can be downloaded under misc/tools.

download / website: www.7-zip.org


2015/10/31 - SpeedFan 4.52 beta 4

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.52 beta 4. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

Sadly, new versions of Speedfan don't work on Win9x anymore. The last version for Win9x (4.51) can be downloaded under misc/tools.

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2015/10/12 - v0.93 alpha R1 test version

Today I'm a little bit proud to introduce this great update. Much content has been added, many changes have been made and some issues have been fixed. Despite all of this the page will still remain in alpha status - too many things, like the CSS code, are still not even in beta stage. Have fun with the new content!


2015/09/22 - v0.92 alpha R9 test version


2015/08/29 - New article: Intel i486 Codenames

Intel released different models of their i486 processors which have their own codenames. Sometimes 486 motherboard manuals only use these codenames in their CPU-Support section, therefor you have to know which i486 has which codename.

Read more: Intel i486 Codenames


2015/08/16 - SpeedFan 4.52 beta 2

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.52 beta 2. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

Sadly, new versions of Speedfan don't work on Win9x anymore.

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2015/07/09 - v0.92 alpha R8 test version


2015/05/19 - v0.92 alpha R7 test version


2015/03/17 - v0.92 alpha R6a - new hoster and domain test version

After some days of downtime this page is back online and more responsive and reliable than ever before - now reachable via soggi.eu and hosted by STRATO (webspace of a coworker). All soggi.piranho.de and soggi.grn.cc (if it will ever be back online) accesses will be redirected to soggi.eu.

The last time I was moving to another hoster was in November/December 2014, I moved the page from soggi.piranho.de (piranho) to soggi.grn.cc (www.grendelhosting.com - Grendel Hosting, Youhosting reseller). All seemed OK for a free hoster - some outages, weak PHP performance, but good features like unlimited disk space, unlimited file size, unlimited traffic, no forced ads, SSH access, 2 MySQL databases, 2 E-mail accounts, some FTP-Clients, free support and other things - enough for this nearly HTML only page.

Last week suddenly the server was completely down for HTTP-requests, the whole files folder (BIOSes, firmware, manuals, drivers, images and logos) was deleted without any notification and the Help Desk (free support via tickets) was deactivated for free hosting clients. Fortunately FTP was still working, so I could save some off page stuff. Today also FTP isn't working anymore, so the server seems to be completely offline.

Even though it's free hosting - this is a shabby treatment by Youhosting and definitely a NO-GO. It seems it isn't Grendel Hosting's fault, because the changes also affect other resellers like freehostingnoads.net.


2015/02/21 - SpeedFan 4.51 Final

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new final version, version 4.51. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com


2015/02/14 - SpeedFan 4.51 beta 6

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.51 beta 6. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1/10

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2015/02/01 - SpeedFan 4.51 beta 4

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.51 beta 4. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2015/01/29 - v0.92 alpha R6 test version


2015/01/28 - v0.92 alpha R5 test version


2015/01/23 - v0.92 alpha R4 test version


2015/01/13 - v0.92 alpha R3 test version


2015/01/01 - v0.92 alpha R2 test version

This website is now hosted by Grendel Hosting, all soggi.piranho.de accesses will be redirected to soggi.grn.cc. Now there's no file size limitation (was 2 MB at piranho) and no advertisement forced by the hoster anymore. The main reason for this decision was that search engine bots were blocked from this website in the last weeks. Another reason was the lousy performance with some hours downtime daily, indeed this problem was fixed with blocking the bots/crawlers, but the page got kicked out of search engine indexes.


2014/12/02 - CPUID HWMonitor 1.26

CPUIDs hardware monitoring tool HWMonitor has been released in a new version, version 1.26. With HWMonitor you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds and voltages.

HWMonitor is freeware and works on Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1, the last version for Windows 98/98SE/ME (1.17) can be downloaded here.

changelog:

download / website: www.cpuid.com


2014/11/23 - v0.92 alpha R1 test version


2014/10/31 - MEDION Service Community is online

As expected MEDION started it's own internet forums called MEDION Service Community in recent days. For now it seems German is the only supported language.

website: community.medion.com.


2014/10/24 - TechPowerUp GPU-Z v0.8.0

TechPowerUps video card/GPU information tool GPU-Z has been released in version v0.8.0. The utility provides a lot of information about the installed video card and its GPU including GPU load, memory usage, clocks, voltages and fan speeds. In addition it's possible to back up the graphics cards BIOS.

GPU-Z is freeware and works on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.techpowerup.com


2014/10/23 - MEDION Service Community coming soon

There are indications on the internet that MEDION will start their own internet forums called MEDION Service Community by the end of October. Invitations to join the project in closed beta status and helping to build up the new community were sent to the third party communities www.medionsupport.com and www.medion-portal.de.

This could be a chance to get more information about motherboards and especially their BIOSes used in MEDION computers which are primarily produced by MSI as an OEM. BIOS files for those boards can be downloaded from MSI (OEM).


2014/09/02 - SpeedFan 4.51 beta 2

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.51 beta 2. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2014/08/20 - SpeedFan 4.50 Final

The hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new final version, version 4.50. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and clocks can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com


2014/08/15 - TechPowerUp GPU-Z v0.7.9

TechPowerUps video card/GPU information tool GPU-Z has been released in version v0.7.9. The utility provides a lot of information about the installed video card and its GPU including GPU load, memory usage, clocks, voltages and fan speeds. In addition it's possible to back up the graphics cards BIOS.

TechPowerUp GPU-Z is freeware and works on Windows XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.techpowerup.com


2014/08/08 - SpeedFan 4.50 beta 2

After some months without a sign of life, the hardware monitoring tool SpeedFan has been released in a new version, version 4.50 beta 2. With SpeedFan you can monitor temperatures, fan speeds, voltages and S.M.A.R.T. attributes. In some cases fan speeds and frequencies can be adjusted. If you like SpeedFan, you can donate here.

SpeedFan is freeware and works on Windows 95/98/98SE/ME/NT4/2000/XP/Vista/7/8/8.1

changelog:

download / website: www.almico.com (registration is required for downloading beta version)


2014/06/11 - v0.91 alpha R1 test version

Today there's a major step to a "final" release of this page - much content has been added and many errors have been corrected. I hope you enjoy the new content! Don't forget, there's more coming...the page still is in alpha status.


2014/02/28 - v0.9e alpha R5 test version


2014/02/20 - v0.9e alpha R4 test version


2014/02/04 - v0.9e alpha R3 test version


2014/01/29 - v0.9e alpha R2 test version


2014/01/06 - v0.9e alpha R1 test version


previous test versions

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