Goin' Way Back; Help with old Asus L1n64-SLI WS/b to run Shanghai

[aaronmc]

This is some pretty old hardware, and it was something of a train wreck even when it was released, but sometimes you just get that geek bug into you and you need to work something through.

I have an Asus L1n64-SLI WS/b motherboard. It was AMD's slapped-together quad-core setup from back in 2007 that was server hardware for a consumer market. It's this very absurdity that attracted me to it.

The motherboard is dual socket F, which means that it SHOULD be compatible with all non split-plane Opterons, which is everything up to Shanghai. Istanbul is out, although theoretically, it should be backwards compatible.

Shanghai IS NOT compatible because the AGESA code in the AMI bios is 3.1.7 and not 3.3.0. I've updated the microcode, but without the AGESA, the computer won't post. No help from Asus. They abandoned the mobo after a year. And I'd imagine most of the engineers who worked on this are dead from old age by this point.

The AGESA code is contained within the 1B module of AMI bioses, at least from the time. Was there any progress with extracting and upgrading AGESA from AMI setups? Is there any way to use AMD's open-sourced AGESA code to achieve this? Does anyone have any other ideas that I might be able to investigate?