Date: Sat, 22 Mar 1997 08:40:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Paul W Brannan <brannanp AT musc DOT edu>
To: opendos-developer AT mail DOT tacoma DOT net
Subject: 32-bit BIOS won't work
Message-ID: <Pine.ULT.3.95.970322083435.20937B-100000@atrium.musc.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

I just want to point out here that there really isn't much of a point in
having a 32-bit BIOS.  Most drivers today run in fast RAM, rather than a
slow ROM.  Yes, it would be possible to shadow the ROM, but then you also
have the trouble of compatibility with each os.

An alternative would be to have each device have a basic set of functions
that could be called whenever drivers are not available.  For example, we
have a Neomagic chip driving a Pentium, but we can't run XFree86 because
there are no Neomagic servers for XFree86.  If we had VESA 2.0 support on
the chip, and a VESA 2.0 server, then things would work just fine.

The problem with this is that people don't like to adhere to
standards.t%!-cU ICW:VV~s~U aS[