OS 6.1 New Operating System

[captainamerica]

ha ha ha ...good one !

[Y-my-R]

I typed all the below first, but it's really just for the curious. It all boils down to this:

Does anyone have an image of the BIOS of one (or both) of the Motherboards used in the D8B rack unit? So, a ".bin" file or so, as you'd use to update the BIOS and/or burn a new BIOS version to a chip?

Similarly, does anyone have the ROM/firmware file from a supported video card that works in the D8B computer unit?

I don't have my hopes up, but want to try a few things. If you're bored, you can read the below, but it's really just my usual blabbering and can safely be skipped

I've been playing around with QEMU (virtualization software), and found it very interesting that this lets you boot very specific hardware configurations, even as specific as PowerPC Mac hardware, that can boot MacOS 9 without compatible physical hardware being present - by having QEMU reference a custom BIOS or in the case of OS9, an "Open Firmware" file.

This is NOT directly D8B related, but has "custom" written all over it, which is why I want to try around with this kind of approach some more (not very successfully, so far), to see if anything I'd learn could somehow be adapted for the emulation of the D8B hardware.

This is the PowerPC project I'm talking about (incl. OS9):
https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/pp ... mu-for-osx

There's even a special version that boots images with an emulated ATI Rage Pro video card (via a ROM file instead of the physical hardware)... which I think someone posted on here before, is a possible replacement for the D8B (...probably not with "Write Combining" but I need to get some other hurdles out of the way before I can play with that).

So, that's why I want to play with QEMU a bit more...

When I try to boot a MackieOS harddrive image via VirtualBox, it gets up to the point where it shows the "Loading MackieOS Please Wait..." message (this is nothing to get excited about... it just means that the drive image should work as a boot drive, but fails at the moment the MackieOS is trying to start a "Window Manager" as in, trying to initialize the video card in a way to display the graphical user interface... and fails.). So, VirtualBox was a nice try, but a dead end, because it doesn't allow to customize the emulated hardware enough, to give me hope to be able to boot the MackieOS, fully. But this should confirm that the disk image generally works as a boot drive.

While I can boot other disk images via QEMU, or even boot from a physical CD-ROM drive/disk, etc., any attempt so far to boot from the same virtual harddisk that works to boot to that "Loading MackieOS..." message in VirtualBox, just leads to an immediate error that this disc is supposedly not bootable, according to QEMU. (I tried the .vhd, .vhdx, .dmg straight from the physical drive, .img (converted) and .iso disk image formats... not always with the right flag for QEMU, but it should at least "TRY" to boot it anyway, if if it gives a warning about the type not being set correctly, I think).

I might be doing something else wrong, but thought I should at least TRY, if it makes any difference if QEMU references a D8B BIOS as a reference for the emulated hardware (probably needs a lot more work than that for this purpose, but I gotta start SOMEWHERE).

So, getting it to boot up to "Loading MackieOS. Please wait..." in QEMU would be the first hurdle I'd like to get over. If I manage to get there, trying to make it use a supported GPU ROM would be the next hurdle...

Anyway... again... please nobody get their hopes up. I don't really have any idea what I'm doing, but got lucky with these sorts of experiments with other projects before, so I at least want to toy around with it a bit.

So, back to the beginning... does anybody have an image of the D8B BIOS (old or new... both should work, IMO) and possibly even the video-card ROM?

Thanks very much in advance!

[arjepsen]

You could try to reach out to Ronn Russ (rruss@comcast.net)
I bought a bios chip from him.

[Jondav1120]

PM'd you a copy of the D8B new motherboard BIOS

Regards

John

[RJH_MUSIC]

Exciting news I think. Yes, i noticed the same behavior when i tried to use a Low Profile ATI Rage video card in my power supply build. Even though the video cared was listed in the support video card list. Got all the way to "Please wait, Loading the Mackie OS:...... and then just sat there. Interesting point though. When booting up the machine, I was able to to see video on startup and was able to launch the BOIS setup and make changes within the setup screen, so wondering if that indicates that the problem is not really with the BOIS but in the OS system boot files. So agree, for what my 2 cents is worth not being a computer programmer, i am thinking ROM/Firmware is the place to start.