4 The goal of this project is to have a LGPL'd Video Bios in plex86,
6 This VGA Bios is very specific to the emulated VGA card.
7 It is NOT meant to drive a physical vga card.
13 The Cirrus SVGA extension is designed for the Cirrus emulation in Bochs and
14 qemu. The initial patch for the Cirrus extension has been written by Makoto
20 To compile the VGA Bios you will need :
26 Untar the archive, and type make. You should get a "VGABIOS-lgpl-latest.bin"
27 file. Alternatively, you can use the binary file "VGABIOS-lgpl-latest.bin",
28 i have compiled for you.
30 Edit your plex86/bochs conf file, and modify the load-rom command in the
31 VGA BIOS section, to point to the new vgabios image file.
36 You can get a very basic debugging system: messages printed by the vgabios.
37 You have to register the "unmapped" device driver in plex86 or bochs, and make
38 sure it grabs port 0xfff0.
40 Comment the #undef DEBUG at the beginning of vgabios.c.
41 You can then use the "printf" function in the bios.
46 Look at the "testvga.c" file in the archive. This is a minimal Turbo C 2.0
47 source file that calls a few int10 functions. Feel free to modify it to suit
53 This program has been written by Christophe Bothamy
54 It is protected by the GNU Lesser Public License, which you should
55 have received a copy of along with this package.
60 The VGA Bios has been written without reverse-engineering any existing Bios.
65 The source code contains code ripped from rombios.c of plex86, written
66 by Kevin Lawton <kevin2001@yahoo.com>
68 The source code contains fonts from fntcol16.zip (c) by Joseph Gil avalable at :
69 ftp://ftp.simtel.net/pub/simtelnet/msdos/screen/fntcol16.zip
70 These fonts are public domain
72 The source code is based on information taken from :
73 - Kevin Lawton's vga card emulation for bochs/plex86
74 - Ralf Brown's interrupts list avalaible at
75 http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/ralf/pub/WWW/files.html
76 - Finn Thogersons' VGADOC4b available at http://home.worldonline.dk/~finth/
77 - Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
78 - Francois Gervais' book "programmation des cartes graphiques cga-ega-vga"
80 - DOSEMU 1.0.1 source code for several tables values and formulas
85 Please report any bugs, comments, patches for this VGA Bios to info@vruppert.de
86 You can find the latest release at : http://www.nongnu.org/vgabios/
87 For any information on bochs, visit the website http://bochs.sourceforge.net/
88 For any information on qemu, visit the website http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/
93 vgabios-0.5 : not yet released
95 . Cirrus SVGA extension (initial patches from Makoto Suzuki, improvements
97 . vgabios image size is now exactly 32k with a checksum
98 . a lot of vgabios and vbe functions rewritten in assembler
99 . dynamicly generated VBE mode info list
100 . write character function for CGA and LINEAR8 modes
101 . read/write graphics pixel for some graphics modes
102 . text scroll feature for some graphics modes
103 . VBE 8-bit DAC support
105 vgabios-0.4c : Nov 06 2003
107 . fix font problem on initial screen of NT4 Loader
109 vgabios-0.4b : Nov 04 2003
111 . fix offset of character tables
112 . optimizations of CRT controller accesses
113 . VBE i/o registers changed to 0x01CE/CF
114 (suggestion from Daniel Gimpelevich)
115 . "noclear" flag stored in BIOS area
116 . fix character height returned by get_font_info function
118 vgabios-0.4a : Aug 17 2003
120 . VBE mode search rewritten (VBE modes with LFB bit removed)
121 . many bugfixes and optimizations
122 . write character function implemented for graphics modes
123 . support for 15bpp, 16bpp, 24bpp and 32bpp VBE modes added
124 . SVGA mode 0x6A added
125 . VBE modes 0x102, 0x117, 0x118 and 0x142 (Bochs specific)
127 vgabios-0.3b : Nov 23 2002
129 . added lfb-mode numbers (patch from mathis)
130 . updated the Makefile
131 . removed display of copyrights.
132 . changed the Copyright string to "LGPL VGABios developers"
134 . set the cursor shape depending on the current font height
135 . clear BL before calling int 0x10 function 0x1103 in vgabios_init_func
136 . added some text font functions
138 . Forced to new DISPI (0xb0c1) interface (requires latest bochs vbe code)
139 . Added multibuffering support
140 . Added new DISPI interface for: virt width, height, x offset, y offset
141 . Added LFB modes (to be used with the vbe-lfb patch in bochs)
142 see VBE_HAVE_LFB in vbe.c (currently default enabled)
143 . updated TODO & docs for changes after bochs 1.4
145 vgabios-0.3a : Mar 10 2002
147 . Fixed bug in function ah=13
149 . updated vbebios implementation to new api
150 . added vbe_display_api documentation
151 . added 640x400x8, 640x480x8, 800x600x8, 1024x768
152 (>640x480 needs a special bochs patch atm)
153 . added 320x200x8 vbe support (uses the standard 320x200x8 vga mode to
154 display, this allows for testing & having something on screen as well,
155 at least until bochs host side display is up & running)
156 . adding lfbprof (vbe) testprogram (+some small fixes to it)
157 . merging with vbebios 0.2
159 vgabios-0.2b : Nov 19 2001
161 . Fixed bug in function ah=13
163 vgabios-0.2a : Nov 09 2001
165 . Included bugfix from techt@pikeonline.net about grayscale summing
166 . Added the "IBM" string at org 0x1e as Bart Oldeman suggested
167 . Fixed DS and ES that where inverted in the int10 parameters list!
168 . The following have been implemented :
169 - function ax=1a00, ax=1a01, ah=1b
171 . Added debug messages for unimplemented/unknown functions
172 Must be compiled with DEBUG defined. The output is trapped
173 by the unknown-ioport driver of plex/bochs (port 0xfff0 is used)
175 vgabios-0.1a : May 8 2001
177 . First release. The work has been focused only on text mode.
178 . The following have been implemented :
181 - functions ah=00, ah=01, ah=02, ah=03, ah=05, ah=06, ah=07, ah=08
182 ah=09, ah=0a, ah=0e, ah=0f, ax=1000, ax=1001, ax=1002, ax=1003
183 ax=1007, ax=1008, ax=1009, ax=1010, ax=1012, ax=1013, ax=1015
184 ax=1017, ax=1018, ax=1019, ax=101a, ax=101b, ah=12 bl=10,
185 ah=12 bl=30, ah=12 bl=31, ah=12 bl=32, ah=12 bl=33, ah=12 bl=34