9fans archive / 1997 / 12 / 2 /    prev next

From: Nigel Roles ngr@sym...
Subject: [9fans] Irony
Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 08:34:05 -0000

I recently swapped my P133 256K COAST motherboard (i.e. what everyone
was buying this time last year) for a shiny new 440LX + P-II MMX 233
motherboard (i.e. what everyone was buying last month). What happened?

Windows 95 took one look at all these new PCI chips and went into a dead
faint. When I bemoaned this at work and commented "what do we have
BIOSes for if they don't set up the chips and present a consistent
behaviour to the OS", I was told by the Microsoft acolytes here that I
shouldn't expect an OS to support all future hardware. OK - perhaps.

By dint of various nasty contortions I installed the latest version
which, while being entirely happy playing with the new chips, rendered
my Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM incapable of operating out of VGA mode.

Plan 9 as to be expected, works fine, including the S3 driver. I'm down
to compiling the kernel (served through the ether) in 70 seconds.

So, in summary, I have to buy a new video card to support Windows 95.
This seems to be a bit of an inversion on the "why doesn't Plan 9
support my '4D semtex disambiguator IV PCI' game playing card" questions
we get in this list!

Anyone know where I can buy a Virge-VX 4mb video card to support legacy
operating systems?