[9fans] Irony

[9fans] Irony

[Nigel]

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?

[9fans] Irony

[Boyd]

    From: Nigel Roles <ngr@symbionics.co.uk>

    So, in summary, I have to buy a new video card to support Windows 95.

just think how many droids they must have employed to get it to work
on that plethora of dingbat hardware.  on the other hand, they would
have probably paid microsoft for such an honour.