Hi Eric -
It is a long story and probably not worth taking everyone's time in this
group. The short version: With the coming of Wayland I have little
choice but to get new display adapters for all of my Linux machines.
Display adapters with good vendor driver support for Wayland do not have
VGA outputs. Therefore I can no longer use my VGA/PS2 KVM.
My FreeDOS system is hosted on an old mainboard - an Asus P5A-B. This
board does not have USB ports and does not have emulation support in the
BIOS. Therefore in FreeDOS it can only use PS2 keyboard and mouse. I
could install a board with USB ports, but that does not help FreeDOS.
There are several old AGP display adapters up on eBay which have DVI
outputs. Judging by the connector photos, they are DVI-I and so should
be easily adaptable to an HDMI display.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is not a full-on Pi. It is a microcontroller much
like an Arduino, though with quite a bit more processing power. I have
built many projects with all of Raspberry Pi, Pico and Arduino. An
Arduino probably has more than enough processor power to do the
conversion. What it does NOT have is a port to plug in USB devices. The
Pico has a USB port. At $4 a Pico is also cheaper than most Arduinos.
===============
Bill Gee
On 1/25/24 10:46, Eric Auer via Freedos-user wrote:
Hi Bill,
if I understand you correctly, your Linux PC stopped
to support VGA or PS/2, so you upgrade everything,
including the DOS PC, to HDMI and USB?
It should be no problem to use HDMI and USB directly
with DOS. The BIOS will have USB legacy support to
convert keyboard and mouse data into PS/2 simulations
made visible to DOS. You could also use DOS drivers,
but using the BIOS is easier. You cannot use both at
the same time for the same controller, but you often
have more than one controller: You could run one with
a driver and leave the other to the BIOS, if you have
the need to use DOS USB drivers for special hardware.
Modern graphics cards (think all sorts of GeForce etc.)
have slowly degraded with respect to their compatibility
to DOS and VGA, so for example the 8x14 font may not be
installed (you can load a driver to fix that) or only
the most popular graphics modes (320x200, 640x480 and
1920x1080, I guess) will work correctly, while exotic
gaming modes may show garbled screen contents.
I would not use hardware converters unless you really
need to use them. For example a PC without AGP, PCI
or PCIe where you cannot install a graphics card with
DP, HDMI or at least DVI output. Those three luckily
are close enough family of each other, so graphics
cards may automatically assist mostly passive adapters
or adapter cables. Your "receive VGA, calculate HDMI"
converter, on the other hand, is basically a computer
itself, with limited compatibility. I would not use a
complete Raspberry to convert PS/2 to USB or back either
if your DOS PC already has USB anyway. Also, Arduinos
have enough power if you do want a PS/2 to USB gadget.
Regards, Eric
PS: Here is a short thread on 4k screens in DOS ;-)
https://www.bttr-software.de/forum/board_entry.php?id=21010
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