On inspection these turned out to be basically the same hardware as that used by the VXL Percio.
He provided the following commentary on them:
They're basically identical to the VXL Percio, run Windows CE, but the hardware is configured differently.
- The socket for the flash BIOS chip is present on the board but no flash chip is installed.
- All the firmware (including the Insyde BIOS) is stored in a 32MB MSystems Disk-On-Chip.
- The Compact Flash socket and associated components are not fitted to the motherboard.
To start with I booted an OS on these units off the network but that ceased to work when the CMOS backup battery went flat. When next powered up the BIOS reset the CMOS to a set of default values which resulted in a setup that would no longer boot from the network. More to the point the BIOS screens provided no obvious way to re-enable it.
Luckily I discovered that hitting shift-F10 gets you to a Realtek boot agent setup menu that allows some minor configuration options. Nothing super useful but I was able to re-enable network booting.