First post, by atar
Now I've already seen two PCI VGA cards which don't work on my Haswell motherboard. Both are S3, one is 86C764 based SPEA Mirage and another one is Miro S3 Vision864 (86C864).
I wonder there are just problems with the VGA cards, or old PCI cards in general.
Is anyone interested in gathering the information how compatible the old PCI cards are? What I gathered so far
|440BX| nForce630a |C226 (Haswell Xeon E5 v3)
ATI RAGE Pro | ok | ok | ok
S3 ViRGE DX (86C375) | ok | ok | ok
Hercules Terminator64 (86C765) | ok | ok | ok
Miro S3-Trio64 (86C764X) | ok | ok | ok
SPEA Mirage S3-Trio64 (86C764P)| ok | ok | black screen
Miro S3 Vision864 (86C864) | ok | black screen | black screen
The 440BX test is only needed to make sure the card is working. I'm pretty sure all the old PCI cards are compatible with 440BX.
Q. Why would anyone ever want to plug an old PCI card into a Haswell or Skylake+ MoBo?
A. The modern motherboards have the VT-d feature, allowing pass trough a physical PCI card to a virtual/emulated machine (VirtualBox/kvm/QEMU/...). The virtualized environments don't emulate the old peripherals good enough, but what they emulate/virtualize good are CPUs. The combination of a physical PCI card with a virtualized CPU allows running some software which won't work in a pure emulated environment. Can be useful for running games which only run on the S3 cards, or some hardware-bound software (think some tape streamer devices which only had drivers for DOS, etc).
Specifically I would be grateful for Vision864 and S3-Trio64 (86C764) tests on the newer motherboards. I need them for PowerPC emulation, but they don't work on my VT-d MoBo. I wonder if it's a general problem with the Haswell+ MoBos, or is it just my the one I've got is buggy.