At startup the conventional PC-BIOS searches (scans) for additional ROMs, such as VGA-ROM.
Kewl. Actually I have noticed that my Savage4 card displays stuff on the screen before the main BIOS is activated. Interesting..
It is then initialized. So a text startup copyright message of the VGA-card would appear on the screen (so does my old SPEA VEGA V7 card).
How would you overcome this "problem"? I didn't have any ideas, because the BIOS needs int 10h for output functions.
Hmm.. I propose someone port something like MacOS or Linux onto ROM first, mainly as an improved form of BIOS.
Personally I would prefer see a port of MacOS to the Intel machine. Basically, if we can pull this one off, we can have instant GUI bootup on an Intel machine..think on it.
Int 10h will only correctly be set, if the VGA-BIOS is initialized. Or would you prefer to program chip registers directly? This wouldn't be very generic...
This is the old quandary. Generic APIs have massive overheads. (Man, my head is spinning with the number of emails I have been getting...Ommm *sigh* relax.)
There is only one way to get around this problem. Consider merging, integrating and simplifying the VGA-BIOS with the system ROM so that we get an integrated bootup sequence, with no textual spam.
Anyone know how to reverse engineer AMI-BIOS for example?
Thanx. Gavin.
- To unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@freiburg.linux.de with 'unsubscribe openbios' in the body of the message