[OpenBIOS] New power-up graphics BIOS.

[Gavin R. Brewer]

>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.

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