yay, keyboard works. now I have fully functional "lilo classic" from under LinuxBIOS.
Thanks to everyone for help.
(the "fix" was to remove the broken keyboard init code from the bios).
Cool. I am interested to see how far, and where this goes.
I'm fairly optimistic.
However, I'm sort of reluctant to go into details before the stuff are released.
Either way. For now, can anyone recommend any "bios tester". something other than dos (windows), and linux? The only other thing I can think of right now is freebsd. Basically, I Think, there's going on some sort of corruption shortly after the control is passed off from LILO. It happens at semi-random points and when I stop ICE it usually is in undetermined state giving me "reboot" as the only option. Right now I don't have many good ideas how to attack this problem short of lots of OUT ax, 0x80 and lots of hand stepping thru code.