Sorry for the delay, but I haven't found any time to answer the 169 messages in my inbox yet... :-/
Stefan Reinauer wrote:
I thought about building something like an eprom simulator which can be plugged into the bios socket of a board and to the parallel port of another computer which just holds a file with the bios image. This would make defelopment and testing *quite* faster. Has anyone experiences with this or does anyone know whether there are ready, cheap solutions for this?
Well, I also thought about this, but I would even go as far as to build a VGA card "simulator", which would be a real VGA card, but with some kind of magic logic that would allow to read the video ram over the net.
For the EPROM simulator: It will cost about 450,- DEM (~ $290) to build, according to a friend of mine who has enough electronics skills (for I have not... :-) ). If everything works out, the simulator will be ready in about two weeks' time. :-)
Should we go the way linux goes and write our own drivers or should we try to use other bioses (i.e. scsi bios on host adapter) for that?
Well, write a own driver, but support BIOS extensions as well. This way the new hardware at least works until there is a OpenBIOS driver for it.
CU Simon