>Two questions:  1) does the display look normal during the initial boot
>sequence, and then (about half-way through) changes to this funky mode?

Yep.

>And 2) does the screen display the card's "Splash Screen" during the
>boot (right before the 20x magnification syndrome)?

Nope. After the initial normal boot messages, I get ~1 inch lines of black
added to the display, which then revert to black-on-white 20x characters --
an 'a' looks something like this in this mode:

 _____
      _
 ______
_     _
_     _
_     _
 ______

xdm tries to start X, but it returns an error, which unfortunately I can't
read!

The other funny thing is that I can't get the internal video to work either.
I understand that this should work in 8-bit greyscale, but although X starts
OK in this mode, the greys are all wrong (mostly too light).

Am I condemned to a black-and-white world, then? :-)

Thanks for your help,

/ewen