[OpenBIOS] VGA card and screen output

[Wallace I. Kroeker]

Hello,

I FINALLY managed to get the screen output working.  (A side benefit is that
I now know a lot more about the 440BX chipset as I assumed this was not
being initialized properly)

The card that I have in my system is an ATI Rage III PCI.  
I finally added some code in START.ASM to initialize the VGA BIOS (from the
reading I've done the VGA cards have their own Video BIOS).  This required
the following:
*	Initialization into 07h mode (monochrome 80 x 25 ... MDA mode)
*	Loading of a Character set (the cards come with a few predefined)
*	Activate the Character set that was loaded
*	Now the VGA base has to be 0xB0000 (MDA location actually) in
Firmware/init/vga.h OR configure the video to be MDA

The actual initialization was done using INT 10h in start.asm.  If anyone
has suggestions on other ways to do this let me know.

I am currently working on getting the floppy enabled.
(The idea being to have a minimum BIOS that can actually be put into the
BIOS flash but still allow boot from disk for debugging or re-flashing)
Has anyone already started this?

Glad to hear Ron managed to get around his NVRAM write issue.

Wallace


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