As a workaround, I have extracted bios.bin and vgabios-stdvga.bin from http://launchpadlibrarian.net/318981898/seabios_1.10.2-1ubuntu1_all.deb, passing -bios bios.bin to qemu and making sure vgabios-stdvga.bin is in the current working directory when running qemu in order for it to be used (seems like there is no command line option for qemu to specify the VGA bios).
-- You received this bug notification because you are a member of qemu- devel-ml, which is subscribed to QEMU. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1859106 Title: 4.2 regression: ReactOS crashes on boot Status in QEMU: Expired Bug description: In QEMU 4.1.x and earlier, ReactOS can successfully boot, but starting with 4.2, it fails, instead coming up with an error "The video driver failed to initialize." This happens regardless of VM configuration (even -M pc-i440fx-4.1) and it works well with older versions of QEMU. bisecting QEMU to find the first bad commit reveals 0221d73ce6a8e075adaa0a35a6ef853d2652b855 as the culprit, which is updating the seabios version; perhaps this bug belongs there, but I don't know the appropriate avenue (it seems seabios is a subproject of QEMU anyway?). To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/qemu/+bug/1859106/+subscriptions