Re: CT60 / CTPCI / Radeon

In article <dfq7l9$nd6$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Johan Klockars <rand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>>etc. is run, so that the user can see error messages etc.. On the Milan, the
>>Bootblock (which does hardware init, memory test etc., before passing
>>control to TOS) contains text-mode init code for S3 Trio cards, plus a small
>>8086-emulator that can execute ROM BIOSses of some cards - ATI Rage cards
>
>I heard about that long ago, but never thought it could actually be true.
>Sounds like an amazing amount of work for very little benefit (I understand
>you don't use the card's BIOS anyway once the VDI is started?), or did you
>have access to the emulator already?

No, not really. Uwe started with emulator source code from some DEC Alpha
project (which had the same problems regarding VGA initialization), but
ended up writing something new.

>Is such a thing as a "small 8086-emulator" even possible?

The complete Milan bootblock fits in one 64k flash sector - including the
emulator. IIRC, the emulator uses something around 32K of code, and not very
much RAM (in excess to that which the emulation uses - but 64K should be
enough for VGA BIOS usage).

The BIOS is not used once the card is under VDI control, but the problem ist
exactly the first phase: getting the card initialized from reset to a state
where is it VGA compatiblem and even able to display a text screen - the
magic required to do this is rarely documented (even if you have full
documentation - it took quite some work to get this working on the S3 Trio),
plus it may depend on the special card and not only on the graphics chip
(due to different types and amounts of memory, different DAC/clockgenerator
etc.), so using an emulation to run the BIOS that comes with every card
certainly looks attractive.

cu
Michael
--
Some people have no repect of age unless it is bottled.
.

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