If there’s ISA XGA-2 emulation, how was it tested without a ROM? Or is it in fact not ISA?”
I’ve tested the “86box” XGA/XGA-2 emulator only with MCA (BIOS dumped from my own IBM XGA-2 card), but it’s quite mature – I mean it runs examples from “Power Programming the IBM XGA” book by Jake Richter. I was not able to test all of the examples from the book, i.e. do full verification of the emulator, because I need to manually type them – I displaced the included diskette with the book. (if someone has backup copy of the diskette and wants to help and email it to me, let me know – I can provide proof I own the book).
so, ISA vs MCA, should be not that big of a deal, even if currently it’s not working, to be added to the emulation, because AFAIK the Radius card itself is doing such thing: it uses MCA-only G200 XGA chip and not the the ISA G201 one and IMSG010JA chip on it is doing ISA-to-MCA translation.
“86box” included to their ROM database the following dump of an ISA XGA card:
since “86box” now includes XGA-2 emulation, do anyone have ROM/VBios dumps of the card mentioned in this article?
If there’s ISA XGA-2 emulation, how was it tested without a ROM? Or is it in fact not ISA?
In theory they could had tested it using for example the XFree86 driver in Linux? Don’t know if that driver would work if the ROM is missing though?
“Michal Necasek says:
May 5, 2025 at 10:37 am
If there’s ISA XGA-2 emulation, how was it tested without a ROM? Or is it in fact not ISA?”
I’ve tested the “86box” XGA/XGA-2 emulator only with MCA (BIOS dumped from my own IBM XGA-2 card), but it’s quite mature – I mean it runs examples from “Power Programming the IBM XGA” book by Jake Richter. I was not able to test all of the examples from the book, i.e. do full verification of the emulator, because I need to manually type them – I displaced the included diskette with the book. (if someone has backup copy of the diskette and wants to help and email it to me, let me know – I can provide proof I own the book).
so, ISA vs MCA, should be not that big of a deal, even if currently it’s not working, to be added to the emulation, because AFAIK the Radius card itself is doing such thing: it uses MCA-only G200 XGA chip and not the the ISA G201 one and IMSG010JA chip on it is doing ISA-to-MCA translation.
“86box” included to their ROM database the following dump of an ISA XGA card:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=74694
but that card is a mystery and maybe even not working prototype. so, IMHO, dump of the Radius Vbios will be more helpful.
I’ll dump the ROM when I find the card. Could be a while though.
In the meantime, the disk is here.