Re: So near but....

Matti E. Aarnio [OH1MQK] (mea@mea.cc.utu.fi)
Tue, 15 Aug 1995 15:43:37 +0300 (EET DST)


> >Getting SVGA cards into VGA compatibility mode is, unfortunately,
> >card-specific. This is normally done automatically by the card's
> >BIOS. However, MILO does not have an x86 emulator (yet?), so it has
> >to know about each and every card that it supports.
> >
> >Have you tried using the SRM instead? (ftp.digital.com:/pub/DEC/axppci)
> >It eats away gobs of memory (2MB) but it ought to work until MILO knows
> >about more graphics cards.

I beg to differ. Most of the SVGA-cards can be kicked into
640x480 mode with minimal set of IO-accesses, however setting
clock-sources, those are apparently card-specific..

I sure wish the OpenProm idea catches wind -- I recall that
PCI defines it as an optional way to handle BIOS on a card..
Naturally PC card makers don't use it :-(

> And the rest. I get fwupdate.exe loading off floppy quite happily, then the
> whole machine stops. That and I made a real bad mistake, I was so impressed
> at finally getting MILO to load I ran the updateflash program that
> unfortunately worked as well..... so I only get MILO now......
>
> What graphics card should I buy, and do you think it'll solve the problem??

As simple and cheap as possible (apparently). Most of the basic
cards have similar ( = same ) way of selecting clocks, as IBM PS/2
with VGA does.

These new wonders with clock synthetizers, etc are another story,
and naturally don't work the same way..

You could, of course, pull the MINIBOOT source, and extend the
VGA-reconition and parametrization in same manner as is done on
XFree86's SuperProbe. (Or even adding your own SVGA hardwired..)

Still better would be to emulate 8086 bios... (yuck)

Well, Alpha-Linux is definitely on the ``bleeding edge'',
at least now..

> Gareth.
> +--------------------------------------------------------+
> | Gareth Bult - Frontier Internet Services Limited. |
> | Sent from the Office: 0171 242 3383 (gareth@ftech.net) |
> +--------------------------------------------------------+

/Matti Aarnio <mea@utu.fi>