Sunday, March 5, 2017

Hercules Terminator 64 strikes back

This is how the S3-Trio64 story (the beginning is in the previous post) went on.

The monitor LED was blinking as if there was no signal, and it looked like after all my suspect was correct and a generic "vga-video-on" code was not enough to initialize a S3-Trio card.

I don't have a null-modem cable to debug OFW using a serial line, so all the instruments I had to debug what's going wrong were the "beep" and "reset-all" OFW commands. Which is not much. So I considered trying another emulators to verify my S3 OFW fix.

First I tried 86Box. Just like PCem it uses a ROM file name to determine whether a PCI card should be available for the emulation. So there is no official way to start it without VGA BIOS. But it's easy to hack: just rename a ne2000.rom to a desired VGA BIOS name. Then there is a network BIOS instead of VGA BIOS, which is harmless because it exits after not finding the network card. Yeah, 25 years ago I used my network card to read arbitrary ROMs, the story repeats itself in reverse.

The screen stayed black just like on a real PC, so I thought I've got an easy way to debug where it goes wrong. Although 86Box (just like PCem) don't emulate serial connections, still using a floppy image is much easier than writing a physical floppy. Alas, after some debugging it turned out PCem and 86Box don't emulate the PLL registers which was the reason why OFW didn't like it. Disabling the PLL restart took the OFW a couple steps further. Up to a 86Box crash, reported here.

Being desperate I even tried Microsoft Virtual PC, which supposedly emulates S3-Trio64. Well, it doesn't emulate the PLL, so I had to get back to the experiments with the physical card.

To make a long story short, the "vga-video-on" was not the problem. It seems that OFW supported only the most of S3 Trio64 and some of Trio64V+ chips.  I was just lucky to have an unsupported one. The OFW developers described the challenge of supporting the V+ chips in this nice comments:

   \ Problem: none of the above will have worked if this is a "Z" version
   \ of the Trio-64. "Z" versions are those parts marked with an "X" after
   \ their part number. Hey, I didn't make this up, S3 did. Anyhow, if you
   \ have one of these beasties, you have to wake up the part differently.
   \ The catch is, you pretty much have to do this in the blind because
   \ until the chip is working, you can't tell which version it is for if
   \ you go poking at a chip that is not awake yet, you may hang the system.

   \ As it turns out, the Trio-64V+ (which at this point in the probe process
   \ is indistinguishable from all of the other versions of the Trio-64, also
   \ won't have initialized prior to the above command. So, that extra command
   \ is usefull for both the "Z" Trio-64 and the Trio-64V+ (also known as the
   \ '765 [all other Trios have a '764 part number]). Oh but wait, there is
   \ more. The 765 does not respond to IO accesses unless the memory access
   \ enable bit is also turned on. Which is why the above now includes this
   \ "feature".
   \ And now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

So I tried to improve the Trio-64V+ recognition process, and Hercules Terminator 64 suddenly worked! The question is if the support of Trio-64V+ breaks the regular Trio-64.

I suspected my Trio-64V+ to be one of the last working ones in this Universe, but I wanted to be sure about it. After some googling I've stumbled over vogons.org, the community of people who still run S3 VGA (among some other cool stuff from the past) on a daily basis. So I asked them to test, and got a lot of responses. (Once again, thanks to everyone who responded)
Up to now there is no report of a Trio-64 which wouldn't work with the current OFW. So the fix is committed in the upstream OFW.

But still if you have one of  S3-Trio32, S3-Trio64 or S3-Trio64V+ cards, please test if they work with OFW, as described on vogons.org.

/Stay tuned for more S3-Trio adventures.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

AMD or NVIDIA? S3-Trio 64! (21+)

While on the Internet there are some hot discussions whether AMD or NVIDIA graphic adapters are better for virtualization, I think I'm the first one to pass thru a S3 Trio 64 VGA.

Well, I'm sure the regular readers of my blog are not just 21+, but probably rather 38+, and still under 90, so they can re what S3 Trio cards are. A casual reader may look it up on the Wikipedia. I can only say - it was very cool in 1995. And in 1997 I think all of my friends already got rid of the Trio VGAs (replaced with, you know, AGP and all this "modern" stuff).

Why S3 Trio? It was used in the IBM PReP machines. At least in IBM 7020 40p aka Sandalfoot. As you may know from my previous posts, Hervé is working on adding S3 Trio 64 emulation to QEMU, and it's still work in progress. I wanted to make sure it will work under OFW, so no proprietary IBM firmware would be necessary.

Boom! It turned out it has been broken in the OFW tree all the time since the sources were published - for more than a decade. No big deal - they are hardly existing (thought I). Made a trivial fix - use a generic "vga-video-on" instead of a chipset-specific one. It didn't work under qemu from the first attempt, because some S3-specific sequencer registers were not implemented, so I had to disable some extra checks. Then it worked. Meanwhile Hervé added the support of these registers, so it also works unmodified.

Probably it would have been a good idea to consider the project finished at this point. But I had already an experience where firmware and emulator were built based on the specs of each other and quite different with the real hardware (qemu-system-sparc and OpenBIOS till 2009, interrupt handling qemu-system-sparc64 till 2012 and so on). So I wanted an independent test, to make sure the generic "vga-video-on" good enough for the S3 cards.

Luckily I still had a Hercules Terminator 64 (S3-Trio64V+) VGA card lying in a basement. So I could check the firmware on the physical hardware. I don't have a PPC machine, but it's no big deal, because the OFW drivers are cross-platform. I've built a floppy with OFW for i686 (the OFW has all the necessary sources and documentation how to do it, thanks Mitch). Booted and got to the OFW "ok" prompt. It works, so the case solved, right? No! Since it's a "video-on", it might be that it worked only because it was initialized by VGA BIOS in the text mode. So I unterminated the Terminator:

Hercules Terminator 64, "unterminated"


The system beeped as if there were no VGA, but after me pressing F1 booted the floppy. The screen stayed black.

/ to be continued, stay tuned.