[Guide] Enhanced BIOS Modding of Award BIOSes

BIOS/UEFI Modding BIOS Modding Guides and Problems
123

I would like to present to you, a new BIOS for the GA-78LMT-USB3 R2. It’s adapted the “Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG” over the stock “Award Modular BIOS v6.00PG”. Not much difference, it was a side project.

Other differences include: Renaming “MB Intelligent Tweaker (M.I.T.)” to the more common “Frequency/Voltage Control”, and renamed all of the DDR3 timing terminology to things you’d see in applications like HWiNFO and AIDA64, so it’s easier to understand what it is you are looking at. PCI option ROM’s are located at the end for easy editing.

Upgrades: Latest AHCI option ROM for slightly quicker boot times. I didn’t bother with the RAID or PXE boot ROM’s. RAID on this motherboard is horrible, and who uses PXE boot anymore? But if you want to update them, they are at the bottom underneath the sensitive modules for your ease of upgradability.

What’s not upgraded: Microcode. It’s stored weird in the factory image, and even though I used Ghidra to recompile the core itself from Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG, I used the original 4MB flash image to not mess anything up with how sensitive these Gigabyte flash images are. I never could update the microcode without a bricked board, and besides, the OS patches it anyway, so it doesn’t truly matter since the board already supports all of the CPU’s it can handle anyway.

With that said, enjoy: 78LTB3R2_P3_R2.zip - Google Drive

This is version “P3”. P1 and P2 were pulled due to my unsatisfaction with the quality of the compilation, I felt I could do better.

buz7lTn
buz7lTn1920×1440 181 KB

lwe5tZb
lwe5tZb1920×1440 176 KB

Vk8nrWA
Vk8nrWA1920×804 125 KB

yDjLkq0
yDjLkq01920×1440 109 KB

Due to the complexity of this mod, unless there is a bug someone finds, I don’t plan to update this further. I’ve pulled at least 4 all nighters this week alone working on this project that basically started as a “can I do this” before I thought “should I do this”. :wink: But hey it worked, and now you got a firmware update for your board that Gigabyte neglected and left on F1.

Remember, this is for the R2 version of the board, and there was only one revision of it.

What’s broken: SMBCFG. This has to do with the Phoenix - AwardBIOS v6.00PG core I used, you’ll now need to use DMICFG instead.

EDIT: P3 was updated to now included the April 2023 Realtek GBE PXE boot ROM. I did attempt to do the RAID controller, but I cannot locate misc.bin anywhere. But again, performance cost with this motherboards RAID controller limits its usefulness, so unless someone request this one, let me know and I’ll keep trying. Also, because I’m finding ways to improve the restructuring, P3 is BETA, but the best one I’ve done so far. It’s not final, so when I do say it’s the final P3 version, it’s the real version. Beyond this beta versions of my BIOS for this motherboard will be prefixed with D for debugging.

124

P3 for the GA-78LMT-USB3 R2 is done and complete, and is now ready for use.

It can be downloaded here: Microsoft OneDrive - Access files anywhere. Create docs with free Office Online.

So this is finally what I would call a complete conversion to the Phoenix Award BIOS, with extra assembly added! And an updated PXE boot ROM (I decided against updating RAID on this board, it’s not worth it).

Now for the extra bits. Rather than your screen being flooded with Award summary nonsense before the OS boots, instead of it saying “Verifying DMI Pool”, I wrote some assembly instead for the function that writes the text:

pushaw 
mov    ah, 0
mov    al, 3
int    0x10
popaw

So with this, once the summary is done spewing its text, the screen clears for you, so the only thing you see from here are either boot errors, or the OS itself, how a PC should boot in my opinion.

I would like to state that the DMI verification, updating, all that is still done, it’s just invisible unless there’s an error, then it will show, only the text related to the redundant stuff has been nulled and replaced with code (and as my code runs first, it will be right there at the top should DMI verification or updating fail).

Enjoy. I don’t think I will be doing a P4 release for a couple reasons:
Microcodes and the RAID ROM. This BIOS is 4MB, but every Award/Phoenix utility sees it as a 2MB ROM, and this is quite true, only 2MB of the BIOS is actually Award, the other half is something I have no idea what it is, but there’s two issues, that unknown second half of the BIOS has the AMD FX microcode, and the misc file required for the RAID ROM to be upgraded. With no tool that can access that portion, that’s more hex editing than my pay grade. I did this for free, lol.

1 Like