Hi Peter,
thank you for your quick response :-)
Peter wrote:
Good times. When I first came to coreboot some 13 years ago I worked on a competing product based on the same Geode.
Wow so you are a pro :-)
Don't confuse "freely" with free as in speech, but anyway I don't think XpressROM was ever free.
I totally agree with you, I performed a lot of searches on google and, at the end, I discover that XpressROM was not free.
If you have the right background and want to learn about these old platforms you could probably reach a working system after a few months of intense hacking, reverse engineering and studying.
My SW/HW engineer background span from the reverse engineering on Linux and Windows X86 applications to embedded systems. But, to be honest, I never properly reverse a bios (just some quick customization, i.e. on the Kreatel bios :)), so I want to start to learn more about it. On the google there are not a lot of books or guides that treat this topic, so it is a little bit complicated for me understard where to start.
How much do you value your time?
The time is never enought for me, this type of job/passion requires ton of time, two good eyes and a lot of patience :)
I somehow know the platforms and I would still recommend not to bother, but to just buy an ASRock E350M1 mainboard, where coreboot is known to already work.
I totally agree, now the two Kreatel boards are so old and with a few of Euros is possible to buy a good new board with new interfaces! I know :-)
Maybe what I'm starting to write is a little bit off-topic, but I'd like to ask you an advise or just an opinion: One of my curiosity and task (I wanted to do this with the Kreatel board, but I understand that it is a little bit complicated :)) is try to figure out how this guy was able to customize and modifiy the Ati-VgaBios: http://tinyurl.com/y47dk7 I don't know if you already know how the Arcade monitors work. Some of them have a "non-standard" Hsync freq (15kHz) and this guy was able to customize the native and built-in freq. table inside the ATI bios, as you can see at the end of this page: http://tinyurl.com/mgcqnar
How can I start to understand how to do this? I tried to start to reverse with some debugger (IDA i.e.) the original Bios X550 (that you could find on the ATI website) it seems that there is not any type of freq. table. In the past, this guy, has customized and modified other Ati video bios models.
Thank you another time for your help :-)
Peter
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Piero