I think we would have more peace of mind once we are successful in making a backup of the bios that could be restored onto a new eprom (or eeprom? Could an eeprom be used in place of an eprom?) I only started learning about the main difference last night in a conversation with a friend of mine who dabbles in electronics and hardware modifications that eprom is programed and can be erased using UV light. Especially when considering long term preparation steps for keeping these machines alive and kicking. Once the thought of these eproms containing the bios possibly going bad or getting corrupted was put into my head, like 98digger here, it raises some concern for me as well. While failing eproms may not be something to be as concerned about as we are more likely to experience problems in other areas first such as bad capacitors, battery acid leakage, et cetera. I will post any information I receive here. Because there appears to be no software for PC-98 that can dump the BIOS, we need to use ROM readers to back up the BIOS instead.Ĭurrently, I am consulting Vintage Computer Forums on exactly how one should go about doing this. To do this, one would need either to physically take the chip, hook it up to a ROM reader and dump it onto a computer, or one could use software to dump it. In case anyone is wondering, I believe that it is in fact legal to back-up the BIOS for recovery purposes only (personal use only). Therefore, the only option is to 'back-up' (or 'dump') the BIOS chip, so one may reprogram the chip (or replace it) in the case of failure. Because the BIOS in PC-9821 computers is model specific, it is impossible to replace it with a BIOS off the internet. As we all know, UV-EPROMs fail after an undetermined amount of time usually 15-25 years. It has been discovered that PC-9821 series computers (nearly every model of them) have the BIOS written to a single UV-EPROM (Chip name: NEC D27C4000D-15). (Original discussion on this topic began here: )

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