New Code :-)

[Simon Richter]

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