No, it MUST. You are one of many who have missed the point.
If you can find someone with a Mac (retail store even), ask
them to let you see the Mac boot. The Mac will actually smile
at you. It most definitely does not spew technobabble.
> The code must be small and effecient.
If it goes into lilo (or second stage loader) this won't matter.
It must get the BIOS crud off the screen ASAP.
> It must work with ANY display.
No, just VGA. You have to be a serious geek to work in text mode.
Actually, I work in text mode, but then I'm a serious geek...
This idea is not for people that can use text mode. It is for
people who would rather not be reminded of their cluelessness.
> Here's my simple crude solution:
>
...
>
> If a suitable card IS detected, it would save the current vid. mode,
> quickly set the pallet and display the image then wait for a key to
> be hit or for a timer (or even a delay loop.. ick) to time out..
> then it would do a quick and simple fade out, return to the previous
> video mode, load the kernel section of the joined file over the pcx
> file and load just as the current system does.
As long as the video card doesn't get so messed up that X won't load,
it doesn't matter. There is absolutely no need to return to text mode.
The kernel doesn't even need the vt102 emulation compiled in.