Now for the good news: just got the following printed while running
Linux/Alpha on a Cabriolet with a #9 GXE Level 12 ISA graphics card
installed:
[*****line of garbage in blue and yellow*****]
Self Test: Passed
#9GXE BIOS Version 1.13.03S
Copyright 1992-93 Number Nine Computer Corp.
All Rights Reserved
Got this with a modified gde 8086 emulator. 386 emulation is not done
yet (I think it will be quite some work), but I added one extension
and one hack that allows the BIOS code to execute to completion (I
assume that the hack is responsible for causing the line of garbage at
the top of the screen). Executing the BIOS initialization took about
1/2 a minute---with lots of debugging output though. But boy, did
those characters trickling onto the screen look great to my eyes! :)
I'm not sure GDE is the greatest source for 8086 emulation out
there. but I chose it over the pcemu source simply because it's GPL'd
and because it has real nice debugging support.
Haven't tried my #9 GXE64 PCI in the Noname yet. The reason for this
is that with a PCI card, you actually need to do some work to enable
the BIOS. On the ISA, it's just there at 0xc0000. However, enabling
the BIOS under PCI is the easy part and I don't expect this to be a
problem once the x86 emulator is robust.
--david