Hervé Poussineau is doing a great job on improving PReP emulation in qemu. The initial patch series is getting merged into upstream master, but there is more in Hervé's git tree:
http://repo.or.cz/qemu/hpoussin.git/shortlog/refs/heads/40p. I've built an OpenFirmware binary with SCSI support for it, and once Hervé improves S3 Trio emulation there will be a build with S3 support too.
Btw, the S3 Trio support in the Herve's branch is already pretty cool. Here are some screen shots of the boot process with the proprietary IBM firmware (it's really just the firmware, not an OS):
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| 40p screen right after the reset |
Other than IBM PC, an IBM PReP machine starts in a graphic mode with some animation, showing the initialization process.
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| Initializing devices |
More devices...
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| All devices are found |
Now the firmware tries to boot an OS or a System Management Services (SMS) disk:
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| F4 was pressed |
Now there is a hidden but a well known feature. Instead of inserting a floppy, blindly type "eatabug", no quotes. For a tech person it may sound like "Enhanced ATA Bug", but I guess the
pronunciation is "eat a bug". And this will open a resident monitor, which looks quite powerful (I still think OFW is more powerful though ;-).
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| Resident monitor help |
That's all about the 40p emulation for today.
/Stay tuned
3 comments:
impressive
Hi - hoping you can help me - I cannot get the proprietary firmware to work at all, I get a black screen (serial) with a cursor moving about the screen but no text. I also get no VGA output. I have tried the current QEMU, your branch from this post and one from Hervé. Any help would be great.
Frankly I don't remember which branch I used for this. The post says it's Hervé's. It definitely needs the S3 Trio adapter, so I guess the Hervé's branch is required. Do you specify -vga s3? And -M 40p ?
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