[rescue] More Nextstep for Intel questions...

[deanders at pcisys.net]

(Yes, it *did* take me long enough to change the name of the thread...)

At 12:41 PM 3/18/2003 -0500, you wrote:
<snip>
>Unfortunately you will only be able to find bits and pieces.
>
>Essentially, though, for graphics cards you can use most ATI "Mach32"
>cards and the Viper 9000 cards, along with most S3 8xx and 9xx series
>cards.  These are the local-bus and first gen PCI cards.  For enet,
>DEC tulip and Cogent 10Mbps cards were well supported, I think.

I did some poking around, and while it doesn't appear that my old laptop's
video chipset (Chips & Tech 65554) is supported natively, there *was* a
third-party driver (from Bifrost?). Unfortunately, Bifrost's URL ends up
redirecting elsewhere (oddly, this morning it redirected to a casino of
some sort; now it just goes to a page saying the domain is for sale), so I
haven't had much luck actually *finding* the driver. The driver appears to
have been available free for personal use, but I'm not sure that matters
much if I can't actually *find* the driver. The fact that the company
itself doesn't seem to exist anymore doesn't help.

(The other company (Synectic) that appeared to be involved *also* seems to
be gone--their page redirects to a casino.)

Of course, I'm not sure it would really work for me, anyway--the Portege
300CT has a nonstandard 1024x600 display, and I have no idea how easy it
would be (or if it would even be possible) to make the Bifrost driver work
with it (sure, I could just use it at 800x600...but I don't really *want* to).

I guess I could always try to pick up an even older (and hopefully
better-supported) laptop...but if I'm going to do that, I might as well
pick up something entirely different. Part of the appeal, after all, was
owning a Nextstation of some sort *and* running Nextstep on it...

Maybe I'll just wait until this summer, when I will hopefully have both
more room and more disposable income...

(Of course, I really ought to get my Sparcstations working first...and I
need to find a keyboard that'll work with the O2...)


Derek Andersen