In a little experiment involving a potentially dangerous BIOS flashing operation, I grabbed a copy of the latest version of the Supermicro X10SLQ-L Motherboard BIOS and flashed it to my unlocked Taito TypeX4 unit. Things happened.
Flash goes the BIOS…
After creating a BIOS update USB by using the wonderful Rufus formatting utility and then extracting the BIOS package to the USB’s root directory, I booted into FreeDOS on the target Type X4 and set to work. The first thing I wanted to do is make a BIOS backup, so I did that. I don’t quite remember the command, but it’s something along the lines of:
AFUDOS TYPEX4.ROM /O
Which then outputted a bunch of informational messages. One line had a incrementing hexadecimal address, which was showing you where the tool is reading from. During this process, the USB drive was being written to with the contents of the BIOS. Once the original BIOS ROM backed up, I went and flashed the stock virgin BIOS by running:
AMI.bat X10SLQ8.518
This took a while. I went and ate lunch, then eventually I got an error along the lines of a01: BIOS does not support ME Entire Region flash. This was probably was due to the fact that I didn’t have the BIOS “Intel ME Image Re-Flash” option set to Enabled.
This error halted the whole system, and I thought the BIOS was bricked. After waiting some time to see if it was going to reboot itself, I power cycled the Type X4.
Task completed successfully! It wanted me to boot into the BIOS settings as it had deleted the CMOS settings. The BIOS Password was removed. The Taito security option that let you change it between various modes was gone, and there were some new BIOS options too.
However, I miss the Taito TypeX4 logo at boot-up but having the freedom of a completely unlocked BIOS is worth it. No more Taito jank on my X4.