[rescue] Non-Fcode PCI VGA in U5?

[Meelis Roos]

Hi, it's me again with my broken Ultra 5.

My U5 has broken onboard video - most times it detects there is no
monitor and disables the framebuffer. When it happens to detect that
monitor is present, it works fine.

So the first question - any ideas of fixing that? Chip test out OK
(framebuffer etc), it only tells that display is not present.

I have tried to solve it wia additional PCI graphics card. Since I have
no cards with Fcode ROM available, I have experimented with non-Fcode
cards. I know it is not supported and the proper way would be with a
F-Code ROM card but let's just ignore it for now.

At first I tried different ATI Mach64's (with or without PC ROM)  -
didn't help, even after upgrading the flash prom of the U5 to the
latest. Then I got a 3D Rage Pro 215GP like the Darwin+ mainboard has.
It has exactly the same PCI ID as the onboard chip (1002/4750) so I
hoped the PROM would initialize it (like it works in SRM etc).
Unfortunately it doesn't - tried with VGA irq enabled/disabled via
jumper and with PC ROM present and missing. Also tried leaving out the
onboard ATI from pci probe list - it doesn't help the detection in any
way. It's still just /pci/pci/display with no Forth words and no
initialization.

And the second question - is there any hope of getting this card
initialized by PROM? I have thought that hacking some F-code into
nvramrc would be a good project to relearn Forth but I would not take
the task if I knew it was mostly hopeless.

-- 
Meelis Roos (mroos at linux.ee)