Hi,
Jeff Garzik wrote:
Matthew Sullivan wrote:
From a previous pose by 'James' at Berkeley, on Feb 17th 2000:
Thanks, I missed that post. Yes, this is exactly what FreeBIOS/OpenBIOS needs to do in order to be able to display video.
Note that many BIOSs do video POST as soon as possible, but initialize other expansion ROMs much later in the boot cycle.
Actually from my expreience with Award and AM BIOS's they test for 55AA at A000 and then C000 looking for a mono card then then a colour booting the first card found and ignoring any second card.... (ie if a mono and colour cards are both present)....
The only thing I haven't worked out is if you have a card not located in the usual position most BIOS's will still boot it... but none of the BIOS's seem to want to init any second card.... (That includes the second VGA port on a couple of twin TVGA 9000 series cards I had to work on a while ago...)
My conclusion to this is there must be a global identifier to indicate the card is a display card... and the current BIOS's look for this so that they can determine, 1/ There is a display card in the system, and 2/ where it is ... I say this because last time I put 2 PCI VGA cards in a machine (not the same type) no matter what addresses I set them to and which slot they physically located, the same card booted each time...!?! This may be worth investigating further....
-- Yours
Matthew
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.