Well, I'm definitely making some progress with the epia m vga.
I downloaded the very latest freebios from CVS and I see that I was indeed missing the shadow copy stuff in mainboard.c and also, I was using the wrong value for the vt8623 PCI id.  Now, I have a different problem.  I'm able to get XFree86 4.3 to start up on tty0 but it complains about  AGP, DRI and linear memory.  I believe there's a post about that but it didn't mention a fix.  I get no output on the monitor until then.  Adding AGP support in the 2.6.6 kernel causes the system to hang after the driver is loaded.  I'll compile a 2.4 kernel + maybe enable framebuffer support in the kernel to test.   Other things that I've tried so far is to enable VIDEO_CONSOLE and the fixup code but I still don't get any output prior to X starting up.  I'm currently clueless about why video mode + PCX loading stuff can be done even before the PCI stuff.  The upside to all this is that I'm now very familiar with the code.  I know there's stuff in the FAQ, but would anyone object if I posted a map of the code for the epia m from entry16 all the way to elfboot() as an example?  I've drawn such a map to help navigate through the directories and code and IMHO all the cool stuff happens at hardwaremain(), anyway.  Cheers and thanks for all the help.