On Wed, 7 Mar 2001, Chip Salzenberg wrote:
> Is the Elpin BIOS specialized for use with Plex86, if only in such a
> minor way as knowing what kinds of pseudo-hardware it's going to find?
> More to the point, does Plex86 effectively require that the BIOS it
> uses be specialized in this way? If so, then Plex86 is actually
> depending on the specific features of non-free software, and it does
> belong in contrib.
>
> However, if Plex86 does not require any specialization in the BIOS it
> uses, then Plex86 belongs in Debian's "main". IMO.
The Elpin BIOS is a VGA BIOS and cannot be distributed with the rest of
plex86 in Debian (main). If there is no free VGA BIOS, then it might be
possible to use the systems own native bios. I don't know how well that
works: it's chipset dependent and the initialisation routine of the native
bios often uses additional ports that may confuse plex86, but that might
not be a problem.
Something like
dd if=/dev/mem of=vgabios bs=32768 count=1 skip=24
For Bochs this is not possible of course (on something different from
a PC).
But hey, why not start writing your own vga bios? Dosemu has done most of
it in 32-bit space (monitor space), but the fonts can be copied straight
away. It's only a 32k binary (but in assembly that's not negligible,
sigh).
Bart
