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Hi everyone It was a long time since my last visit here

(while reading this post, please consider I could write moderately horrible and incorrect sentences. That's primary because I know nothing about what an writing. "You know nothing, John ignus")

Recently I was thinking to buy the most beautiful piece of hardware a man has ever invented: Nvidia riva 128(ZX). The second graphics card produced by NVidia, released in 1997. The intent is to write an interface to let me use all the fancy-hw-accellerated-features, 2D and 3D (!!). The board is very well documented, primary because I'm not the first developer affacinated by this board.

Now. I've got a year 2005 motherboard with a multicore intel processor, that I usually use to test software for the company I work for (writing driver for -much less complicated- board, sort of routers). And now I've a problem. What OS should I use to develop my driver?
I need something that lets me access hw easily, but also something modern (not 640kb limit please). And, most important, I don't want to follow any driver model (no WDDM, I'm not smart enough to understand how it works. Honestly first).

I was thinking about FreeDOS + Dos Extender. But I never used it, I don't know if it meets my needs. My company uses a super-secret RTOS people can download for free on the net. I don't like it very much. I really don't know why, me and that rtos have a bad relationship.

I think I'll go dos+extender.

There's someone who wants to share his/her experience and suggestion here? Every voice will be heard

I can suggest you to use KolibriOS.

ignus wrote:And, most important, I don't want to follow any driver model

It means you need an OS without any protection. But such OS is in no way close to "modern way to access hardware resources".

not sure if it is applicable to your situation: once you boot to efi shell in UEFI system, whole memory and IO space is accessible. There are array of commands available. EDKII has python that runs from EFI shell. That means speedy development possible in efi shell. I havent worked much with it though.

Since this post has already been ressurected...

I like this Metalkit project. http://scanlime.org/2008/03/introducing-metalkit/

VMWare uses it as the base for their 3D video graphics adapter example OS images.

It's essentially a boot loader, plus a few C libraries for finding PCI devices, writing text to the screen, handling interrupts, etc. I haven't used it myself, but it looks great if you just want to throw together a hardware driver of some sort.

Also, here is the VMWare project that uses Metalkit, if you want to see an example of how it can be used. https://sourceforge.net/p/vmware-svga/g ... /tree/lib/

ggodw000 wrote:not sure if it is applicable to your situation: once you boot to efi shell in UEFI system, whole memory and IO space is accessible. There are array of commands available. EDKII has python that runs from EFI shell. That means speedy development possible in efi shell. I havent worked much with it though.

I doubt his 2005 motherboard has an EFI BIOS.