But I think sparingly, in moderation, and moderated, and only for those stated purposes, there's nothing truly wrong or bad about it. What I would not want to see is "here's a post with a thousand links to every video card firmware ever made ever, ?!!!111eleven" or "here's a complete ROM set for MESS or PCem". I am aware that is an inconsistent and self-contradictory policy to hold. (However, I think that linking to firmware to obsolete arcade games for the purposes of repair and diagnostics and emulation should not be permitted. So I'm not completely aware how this would be any different, other than the fact that it doesn't come from the manufacturer and people can't hold VOGONS responsible if flashing it toasts their hardware.
Unless I am mistaken, people have linked to manufacturer BIOSes hundreds of times before in Marvin.
I can't approve any and all things and I DO know what the disclaimer says at the bottom of every page, but I personally think that linking to firmware to obsolete PC hardware for the purposes of repair and diagnostics should be permitted, regardless of whether you sourced it from a manufacturer's dead FTP or that you dumped it yourself. I know some forums get antsy about these things. I need a mod's approval before I'm posting dumps of the system BIOS. If we had a dump of the Matrox video editor box BIOS and video BIOS we might be able to figure out the fault reason. Is there anyone here skilled enough to help answer a few questions? I can't dump the video EPROM as I do not own anything capable of dumping the extremely oddball Intel D27513 EPROM properly (I've still tried anyways but I'm not posting a link unless a moderator allows it) so I have to figure out what might be the fault, starting with how the 286 BIOS detects and initialized the video hardware, or how it rejects any installed hardware for use by the system at POST. I'm apparently the owner of the only one still known to exist (and the only person to ever photograph it inside and out) so there are no replacement parts or any support from Matrox. It's essential as it does various things such as control overlays and data from the lightpen and you can't just replace it with some other video card.
The issue however that I am running into now is that the American Megatrends BIOS gives the two long, eight short "Video Failure or Video Card Not Installed" beep error when the extremely specialty VGA card is installed (and sits at code 1A while beeping which indicates that it is returning from the video ROM). I spent the last few years working on and off with it to bring it back to life and eventually yielded a successful POST (with just the SBC and a random ISA video card) after dealing with a number of shorted tantalum capacitors. (click the images above for better photos of each card) The front of the machine has ports for a small keypad (or a regular keyboard) and a lightpen.
The computer controls the player using RS-232 and video feeds into the video card either for digitizing or to be overlaid on the normal video signal using some software package. The computer itself consists of a 286 SBC board and two specialty ISA cards for video and audio. It's basically a laserdisc player strapped to the top of a massive case with a hard drive, two floppy drives, an amplified front speaker and a passive ISA backplane. So I have this really bizarre Matrox E-VDP machine.