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Soundcard emulation in DOS on non-legacy hardware. Possible? (Emulation)

posted by Zyzzle, 04.11.2022, 08:04

> I for one would like to know where (or if) I can download these video BIOS
> images on the Internet. Do you have any leads?
Rare as hen's teeth to find raw onboard graphics Intel VBIOS files on the internet. They're usually embedded into the BIOSes of individual manufacturer's BIOS updates, and often encrypted as well, which makes extracting the raw 16-bit images difficult. Best way I've found to get the raw VBIOS code is to extract and dump the individual VBIOSes in DOS with a program like PVIEW or Checkit. Here's a thread on VOGONS about extracting VBIOSes:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=61451

There's no online repository of these BIOSes that I could find, however the following has some files and a good discussion about checksums and hacking / hex-editing the onboard Intel vBIOSes of old Sandy Bridge / Haswell core systems, with a few VBIOSes posted :
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/news-intel-sandy-ivy-bridge-and-haswell-vbios-modules/30272/61

At one time Intel itself kept a runnig log of its VBIOS revisions, but it appears to have been taken down. There were some ~60 different revisions of the main 16-bit Intel onboard VGA VBIOS. It is approx 63kb in size.

Personally, I've extracted the Intel onboard graphics vBIOS code from as many old laptops as I have (from Haswell to Kaby Lake), and the code is very similar for them all. The dates in the VBIOS ROM code range from 2013 to 2017, and I wish I could decompile them and shadow the ones which work better (eg, Haswell has good LFB and VBE 3.0, as well as good VGA compatibility on bare metal DOS) and "overwrite" the ones which have broken compatibility (eg, Kaby Lake). Checksums would need to be recalculated, and it's very likely I'd brick the laptop by attempting to do this, however, so I haven't attempted it!

>
> Anyway, I think for a more modern option ROM compliant with PCI 3.0, you
> might be able to get away with loading the "ROM" image in normal RAM, at
> somewhere like 0x9000:0 rather than 0xc000:0.
>
> Thank you!

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