I would really love to know more about this.
I assume it's this VGA driver:
https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/tree/master/Source/XPSP1/NT...
> It is based on the SpiderSTREAMS source, stremul\msgsrvr.c.
There's some special history.
Could this be seen a distribution by Microsoft? I mean, if you can sue Pirate Bay for the content they host...
and VESA VBIOS from SeaBIOS project
Unfortunately I believe modern GPUs without a standard VBIOS may not act enough like an IBM VGA for a generic VGA VBIOS to work, so I see another project for someone in the future: a retrofit VBIOS, especially for those GPUs e.g. Intel's for which lots of open-source driver code and documentation is available but later models no longer come with a VBIOS.
Perhaps also injecting a true CSM from an old closed-source UEFI BIOS, before they started removing it, is worth doing as in my limited experience SeaBIOS isn't as quite compatible as the closed-source ones for some edge-cases.
But, as okanat says, if the goal is to run legacy operating systems, then modern hardware is going to be challenging in other ways too. IME the biggest thing I want PC BIOS back for is the ability to use non-GPT disk layouts, which this doesn't accomplish as, as to use it you put it on the EFI partition on your GPT disk.
Meanwhile, other implementations will not consider the disk bootable in BIOS mode if the partition in the pMBR is not marked bootable.
For instance, whole-disk btrfs. Or old BSD partition schemes.
In any case that is far beyond the original scope of booting old PC OSes, which MBR support alone serves really well (99.9% of the way there, really), which is why I assumed by default you were thinking of MBR, not some other weird scheme.
This is the project that I think has been needed for a while now.
So much that a Replacement CSM for user implementation has been top of mind to suggest here, awaiting the next time I see a request from programmers looking for a worthwhile project.
Now there's nothing more performant than a request being granted before it's even been made :)
Additionally, it was just 3 years ago that memtest86plus finally got a UEFI version. That was painful for a few years there. (Though the 4GB RAM limit would have made this not an ideal solution.)
I'm sure there are other such self-hosting utilities that haven't been and may not be ported/rewritten to work under UEFI.
