> > That would be cool. But I have something in mind that's a little
> > different... Would it be possible to emulate the standard IBM PC BIOS
> > routines that ISA video cards need?
>
> Yes; I've discussed that recently with someone and he even has already
> written the emulation. Aparrently the emulation is not fast bad good
> enough to run a UNIX on ...
Not fast enough is typical a problem with PC video bioses. In the early
days the Linux/Alpha bootloader had a freeware x86 emulator to run
the vga bios code. This emulator wasn't fast enough to emulate a timing
loop inside of my ATI mach64 bios, so the clock chip didn't get the
right timing. The DEC people put in a lot of work in their x86 emulator
to bring up a mach64 card (and did it again to bring up matrox millenium
cards). I guess, that they are using a similair trick, as they do with
freeport (a sparc "emulator" for Alpha). Freeport translates the native
Sparc code to native Alpha code.
Thomas.
--
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too ;-)
[Linus Torvalds in <4rikft$7g5@linux.cs.Helsinki.FI>]
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