Duane> I finally got MILO flashed into my AlphaPC64 Cabriolet board;
Duane> however, I have a Diamond Stealth 64 PCI Video card. The VGA
Duane> card doesn't startup, I have to view all I/O through COM1
Duane> remote terminal. Anyone have this working?
Not as far as I know. I have tried to get MILO to initialize my #9
GXE64 PCI and got it to the point where it was able to talk to the
graphics card. However, I wasn't able to get the card to display
anything on the screen (except for making the screen go completely
blank...). I checked the S3 864 handbook carefully but couldn't find
anything wrong in the code (but then, I'm not all that familiar with
VGA et al). Reading back the VGA registers gives the expected values,
so it looks like there is some additional magic that needs to be done
(maybe with the clockchip?). If anybody knows more about this, I'd
love to hear about it. (Anybody with an x86 disassembler/knowledge
care to reverse engineer the BIOS init routine? I'd be happy to
provide a BIOS dump... :)
If you want to play around with the Diamond card, be sure to change
MILO such that vga_init() gets called *after* the PCI bus is
initialized. Also, you'll need the latest kernel patches (1.3.21+pci)
because earlier kernels had a bug in the bios32 code that resulted in
I/O space getting disabled for VGA cards.
The real solution, of course, is to get vendors to put OpenBoot
firmware onto their PCI cards. As this isn't likely to happen soon,
an x86-emulator that allows to execute the BIOS initialization code
seems like the way to go for now.
--david