First post, by atar
I'm working on emulation driver for S3-Trio in qemu / OpenFirmWare. It would be nice to verify that it actually works on the physical cards too.
Is anyone interested in testing it? It's implemented as a bootable floppy.
My S3-Trio64V+ was not supported by the original OFW, so I had to implement a fix. Now I'm wondering if the fix doesn't break the older S3-Trio (32/64/...) cards.
Two levels of testing:
1. "Hey, not too rough". Just boot the floppy, see if it gets to the "ok" propmpt, and write me the result with the name of the card (or chip).
2. "Hurt me plenty". Remove the VGA BIOS ROM. Power on the PC, it will beep as if the graphic card were not present. Press F1 to boot (or configure BIOS to ignore all errors before removing the VGA BIOS ROM). Wait till it loads the floppy and one more second. Report if the screen turnes on. If it doesn't, try to see if the system responds to 'beep' and 'reset-all' commands followed with enter.
Let's see if anyone is brave enough to boot Forth from a floppy. 😉 Ah, almost forgot. It's for PCI cards. Probably won't work on VLB ones. I compiled the code for 486, but tested only on Pentium.