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:
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.
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.
2 comments:
did the Trio in PREP run a custom firmware?
Custom in a sense that VGA BIOS ROM was not used. It was initialized by IBM Firmware or OFW depending on a model.
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