Wow! I got it! I use another S3 video card,and succeeded in bringing up the VGA,and
Excellent. Its really touchy about what VBIOS will work and what won't. I haven't been able to narrow it down as to what the missing piece is yet.
ATI seems to be the worst though. Probally because of all the bios extensions they use.
perhaps it would make sense to summarize "lessons learned" and send them to list, so that whoever will play with ADLO next can benefit from the knowledge
Setting up a "known to work" table of chipsets vs cards may be a good idea as well.
Just put in all right keywords so that it is easie to find it later on, like ADLO, S3, etc. The shadow patch probably isn't big either.
After my initial post of the patch (about a 1.5 years ago) I never really tried to push the patch upstream since its chipset specific.
What's really needed here is vga expansion rom shadowing support in the pci resource allocation code. So that you could do something like this in the config file.
option SHADOW_VGA_BIOS=1 option SHADOW_VGA_BIOS_DEST=0xC0000
Then the mainboard chipset code could handle copying it from the PCI ROM to the shadow location and ADLO would not need to know anything about how to shadow for a specific chipset.
I for one could really use this feature. I'd offer to code up an implementation for the 440bx but I don't have much of a clue on how the PCI resource allocation works.