NetBSD 6.1.4 on Dell Inspiron 3700

[Jan Stary <hans%stare.cz@localhost>]

I am trying to install 6.1.4/i386 on this Dell Inspiron 3700,
without much success. The installer's kernel either stops at
piixide0 and doesn't go any further, or uvm_fault's while
detecting esm0.

Here are the two screens (sorry for the jpegs, no cereal around):
http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700-netbsd1.jpg
http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700-netbsd2.jpg

That's with the default boot option (1).
The same happens with option (2) - no acpi, as the
acpi isn't used anyway, because "BIOS is too old".
The BIOS updates only exist as *.exe files of course.
(Or does anyone have a UNIX friendly way to update
BIOS on these machines?)
The same also happens with (3) - no acpi, no smp,
as there is no smp either.

For comparison, here is a fresh install of OpenBSD:
http://stare.cz/dmesg/dell-inspiron-3700.20140430

Is there something obvious I am missing?
Is there a specific problem with these Inspirons
that I need to solve before I can install NetBSD on them?

My primary motivation is to augment the OpenBSD audio driver
http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=maestro&arch=i386
(it's a maestro, see the OpenBSD dmesg) to also have recording.
I was advised to also try other *BSDs and try to steal from them
(I couldn't install FreeBSD either).

Reading http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?esm+.i386+NetBSD-current
it seems NetBSD has full duplex for these audio chips ...

        Jan