I had a huge amount of feedback on the original BIOS logo modding guide. Many questions as well, but the main one being 'What about my AMI BIOS?'. After all, the EPA format is an Award/Phoenix thing. AMI on the other hand, uses a variety of different logo formats. Here I'm gonna show you how to change the standard EnergyStar logo. Unfortunately AMI seems to keep their good logo utilities out of reach from the general public, but that doesn't stop us!

   Once again, the disclaimer: I (or Virtual-Hideout.Net) won't take any responsibility if something happens to your BIOS! This is a strictly "do at your own risk" mod. Modding the BIOS will probably kill any warranty you have on the board.

   Some people have also asked about where to find the correct BIOS image for their motherboard. Best place to get them are at your motherboard manufacturer's website.

   I've tried this mod on 2 different AMI-based motherboards (The victim in this article being a Gigabyte 7ZMMH), but they both used the same (award-lookalike) BIOS system. I don't have access to any motherboards that run AMI HiFlex or WinBIOS interface, so I'm not 100% sure this mod will work on these boards, so don't hold me to it :)

The Utility

   AMIBCP is AMI's BIOS editing utility. It allows you modify pretty much everything in an AMI BIOS, from default CMOS settings to adding/remove modules from the BIOS file.

Main Menu

Modules Screen

  The 2nd pic is the modules screen, where you can insert and delete different pieces of the BIOS. Each module does different things, whether it's the APM code, Video BIOS for onboard video, to BIOSes for extra IDE controllers. AMI seems to have several different ways to add graphics and boot logos to the BIOS, but there’s one in particular we should look at: 31 OEM Logo Data. This is typically the BIOS Logo in the top right corner. Some specs:

• 132 pixels wide, up to 480 pixels long

• 4 Bit colour (16-colours)

• Standard PCX file! No need to convert them to some proprietary format!

   Cool thing about the AMI logo is that you can have one that goes right to the bottom of the screen. Only problem is width-wise, anything over 132 pixels, and the image will run off the right side of the screen and overlap onto the left.

  One weird thing though is the palette. AMI uses their own 16-colour palette which doesn't exactly match some graphics progs. I'm using Paint Shop Pro 7 for this article, I found Photoshop seems to have some problems saving 16-colour PCX files properly.