Netroom's Cloaked BIOS as a BIOS upgrade.

Several people have asked recently about using Netroom to
upgrade and or correct problems with their existing BIOS.
The following is an explanation of the kinds of BIOS
problems that Netroom's BIOS can fix.

When manufacturers license BIOSs from BIOS manufacturers
they frequently license source code for the BIOS.  They then
modify the source code to work with the particular chipset
that they use.  Sometimes the system board manufacturers try
to sneak in some of their own special BIOS features, and
sometimes when they do this they introduce bugs.

Also, when 386 systems first came out and for a few years
thereafter BIOS manufacturers were still getting their BIOSs
cleaned up, so BIOSs with early dates can have some
performance problems as well as some incompatibilities.

Finally some companies feel that their changes or
modifications to the BIOS are simply the introduction of new
standards.  Users of those systems bear the burden of such
assumptions.

Netroom 3 includes a BIOS from Award Software.  This BIOS
replaces the existing BIOS in virtually all systems.
Netroom queries the existing BIOS about some aspects of the
system configuration, measures others, and directly reads
others from the hardware.  Once all the information on the
system's configuration is known, the Netroom BIOS
deactivates the regular BIOS and takes over.

This process can resolve incompatibilities caused by any of
the three kinds of BIOS problems listed above.  Netroom also
re-builds many of the BIOS's tables and provides newer
versions of others.  This can also resolve some
incompatibilities.

Example: The IBM ValuePoint line has a BIOS "anomaly" in
that it does not have hard drive tables.  This makes
Windows, and other software think that the drives are not
Int 13 drives and so Windows cannot perform 32 bit disk
access.

Netroom's BIOS queries the system and, if they don't exist,Netroom builds the hard drive tables.  This allows the
ValuePoint's to use 32 bit disk access with Windows, which
would not be possible without our BIOS.

Netroom's BIOS is also the result of Helix's and Award's
many years of experience in the System development arena.
The Netroom BIOS is the result. It is highly compatible and
highly efficient.

Netroom BIOS generally out-performs even a RAM shadowed BIOS
by as much as two times.  This can allow some slower systems
to achieve better hard-disk performance by re-formatting
with a 1 to 1 interleave.  (Some early AMI BIOSs have a
problem with their hard disk interrupt handler that prevents
a 1 to 1 interleave.  Netroom's BIOS corrects this.

Although this will not mean that your system will all of a
sudden become amazingly faster, but you should see a
"crispness" that was not there, even if your hard drive is
already operating at its maximum speed.

Some common Questions:

Q: Will Netroom's BIOS work on a VL bus system as well as
EISA and MCA?

A: Yes.  We have different versions for each, and we can
even mix, as in VL-Bus EISA.

Q: Will cloaking work with SCSI and ESDI controllers and
other cards that have their own BIOSs?

A: Yes, these kinds of controllers come with their own BIOS
which Netroom will not touch.  Thus your hard disk or other
device will continue to be accessed normally through the
controller's own BIOS and the rest of the BIOS functions
will be performed by the Netroom Cloaked BIOS.

Q: Will Netroom's BIOS work with other protected mode
software like Lotus 3 or Paradox?

A: Yes.  These programs use DOS extender technology which is
very similar to Cloaking itself.

Q: Will Netroom's BIOS work with Windows in Standard and
Enhanced modes?

A: Yes.

Copyright (c) 1993, Helix Software Co., Inc.