On Wed, Mar 07, 2001 at 09:27:28PM -0800, Willow Schlanger wrote:
> Also I have a VGA BIOS but it was made after reverse engineering my own
> s3 BIOS and I'm worried that it might be illegal to use it for
> commercial purposes.
> now it was written from scratch, but I learned how to do things by tracing
> s3 BIOS and 'noticing' which ports it accessed when
[very interesting description of reverse engeneering process]
> This way you don't actually disassemble but you create a tet file
> detailing what port I/O gets done for what INT 10 function, you see what
> conditions are taken
> So.. now you guys know what my VGA BIOS is all about.. can you still use
> it even though it was made after I reverse engineered my own BIOS? Would
> that put legal obligations on Plex86 that are not consistent with LGPL?
> I think it's OK with GPL.
It is almost certianly /not/ OK with the GPL... it is at least highly
suspect to distribute at all.
However, what you could do is write detailed documentation of the API based
on your psudodecompilation, and sombody else can write a BIOS based on that.
> Please lemme know. I'm not planning on adding S3 specific things unless
> someone's going to use it... because I have no use for it. Windows 95
> runs in VGA-only mode.
OTOH, you can't get past 640x480x256 that way.
I think it'd be really cool if you posted your tools, BTW -- it sounds like
they could form the core of a kickass decompiler.
-=- James Mastros
--
90% of yiddish means "dick". You have to look past that to /what/ meaning
of "dick" it has.
AIM: theorbtwo homepage: http://www.rtweb.net/theorb/
