[GEM Development] Another video driver

[John Elliott]

> Has anyone tested this for you yet?  I confess that I was not able.  I
> have nothing even remotely like the correct hardware.

  No-one's come back to me about it.
 
> I'm curious about point iv.  What bits of the Xi bios are pants, and why so?

  Just for starters, the only way you can detect some keystrokes is to put 
the whole keyboard in raw mode, and then you lose autorepeat and have to
handle all the shift keys yourself etc.
  Then there's the whole character output thing, where the documentation
says to use INT 0F1h but the actual BIOS doesn't implement it. And the
puzzling gaps, where (for example) you can set the beeper pitch and
duration, but there's no call to play the beep and wait for it to finish.
Instead you have to hook the timer interrupt and work out how many ticks the
beep is going to take.

-- 
John Elliott