On Tue, 27 Jul 2004 13:08:01 -0400, Miles Nordin <carton@Ivy.NET> said:

> anyway, if anyone's used XFree86's int10 support to get a PeeCee video
> card working in a Mac (albeit only under X, not wscons, of course),
> I'd be interested to hear about it.  I dunno if it's even
> theoretically possible.

Yes, it's possible, even doable.

I had to get a chips driver going for my MBX860 (an mpc PowerPC
variant) port.  Since the MBX firmware knew nothing about the added
pci card, I had to initialize the pci stuff on the chips card, then
initialize the chips chip to a standard VGA configuration.

The MBX card has the advantage that it reflects the PeeCee IO space at
(physical) address 0x80000000.

I had to modify XFree somewhat, including changing from opening the
wscons for memory, IO, and framebuffer access to /dev/mem.  But there
is indeed an I386 simulator in XFree.  The int10 stuff just works.

I have a notion (but no time) to use the int10 and its I386 simulator
to execute the chips initialization firmware on boot-up.  I believe
it'd work, but I've no idea of the effort involved.

Scan this list and the PowerPC list for issues involving XFree.  These
memory issues have come up before.

-Mike