On 5/8/10 4:43 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
On May 8, 2010, at 4:34 PM, Kris Tilford wrote:
On May 8, 2010, at 6:22 PM, Bruce Johnson wrote:
It has to be done in DOS because Windows needs to access the
Flash ROM of the video card to display anything, whereas a DOS
display relies on hardware character generators on the video card
that is unaffected by the higher level programming of the card.
And the stock old school character based display hardware all looks the
same as the old IBM pc MDA card. That was the old pc way to
interoperability, make everything look exactly like IBM's hardware.
I always wondered about that, thanks Bruce for the explanation. I
assume this is the same for Mac when booted in single-user or open
firmware? Something that has always been strange to me is that PC
Hackintosh computers use regular PC ROM video cards under OS X and
can't use a Mac ROM card at all. I haven't thought about it much,
but for some reason it seemed reasonable to me that a Mac ROM
Radeon 7000 PCI SHOULD work under OS X in a PC, but instead, you
must flash it back to the original PC ROM to work under OS X in a
hackintosh.
Between PPC and Intel machines I'm pretty sure it's byte order
issues.
I would bet that you could put a video card from a Mac Pro into a
Hack and it'd work.
Not just the byte order but there is boot code in there. PPC can't run
Intel and vice versa. And nothing like Rosetta is running at the boot
stage.
Is it DOS or the DOS command shell under Windows that the card patching
programs need. I always figured they were DOS programs because those
writing them were too lazy to create a GUI.
--
Clark Martin
Redwood City, CA, USA
Macintosh / Internet Consulting
"I'm a designated driver on the Information Super Highway"
--
You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for
those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs.
The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette
guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml
To post to this group, send email to [email protected]
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
