MILO

[Nikita Schmidt <cetus@snowball.ucd.ie>]

Hi,

I've built several new MILO images based on Jay's unpublished source
code with my earlier announced enhancements.  They are expected to
support all platforms that Jay's MILOs used to support and to be 24-bit
TGA aware.  These images are built against the free x86 emulator,
because, as I'm sure you know, the one from Digital doesn't link
successfully with anything but glibc-1.93.

The images are available at ftp://genie.ucd.ie/pub/alpha/milo/milo-980902/,
as usual.  Platforms supported are: Alcor, Alpha-XL, Alpha-XLT,
AlphaBook1, Avanti, Cabriolet, EB164, EB64+, EB66, EB66+, LX164, Miata,
Mikasa, Noname, PC164, Platform2000, Ruffian, SX164, and Takara.  So far
only Avanti has been tested.

I'm going to release the source code as well after cleaning it up a bit,
provided that I have enough success reports.

We should probably resolve this BIOS emulation issue if we could switch
a VGA to text mode just by playing with the card's registers, without
resorting to the BIOS.  I've tried to do it with no success; either I'm
not informed enough on the details of the procedure, or my card's BIOS
performs some card-specific initialisation even when asked for a
perfectly generic VGA graphics mode.  If anyone knows how to put a
generic VGA card into the text mode (from 640x480x16c) without int 10h,
please drop me a mail...

Have fun,

Nikita