[nfbcs] Getting access to BIOS settings

[John G. Heim]

You are talking about a PC Weasel card.  I have one and it works sometimes. 
The PC Weasel is a VGA card that has a serial port for output instead of a 
VGA port. It takes characters from the video buffer and sends them out as 
ASCII to the serial port. So you can run a terminal emulator on another 
computer and see the video.

This works as long as the card is in character mode. So for configuring a 
BIOS, it works only with older machines or high end machines that detect 
that the card cannot go into graphics mode.

There are a lot of other uses for this card. For instance, you can run grml 
and get video output to a terminal emulator rrunning on another machine. I 
use it all the time when I'm making live CDs. If I don't know why my live CD 
won't boot, I usually put the PC Weasel in a machine.  There's no way to get 
earlier boot messages than you can with a PCWeasel.

But it doesn't usually work for the purpose that I bought it for -- to 
access a BIOS. Another problem is that the card is no longer being 
manufactured.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bryan Schulz" <b.schulz at sbcglobal.net>
To: "NFBnet NFBCS Mailing List" <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:48 AM
Subject: Re: [nfbcs] Getting access to BIOS settings


> hi,
>
> the only thing that came close a good five years ago was a pci card you 
> install and connect a serial cable.
> i guess you needed another machine or device to read what the card was 
> sending.
> i never saw or had one and forgot what it was called.
> sure would be nice if something like navigator or elequence was built into 
> the rom chips.
>
> Bryan Schulz
>
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Dale E. Heltzer" <deheltzer at msn.com>
> To: "'NFBnet NFBCS Mailing List'" <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:16 AM
> Subject: [nfbcs] Getting access to BIOS settings
>
>
>> This question is asked so often, yet I have nothing in my archives about
>> it.
>>
>> *Is there an app out there to give me my BIOS settings in an accessible
>> format?
>>
>> TIA
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Dale E. Heltzer
>>
>> deheltzer at msn.com
>>
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>
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