Windows ME falsely detects qemu's videocards as Number Nine Imagine 128

[Oliver]

A fresh installation of Windows Millennium Edition (Windows ME, WinME) as guest OS on qemu interprets qemu's videocards as Number Nine Imagine 128 with the consequence, that

1. It is impossible to change color depth.
2. WinME uses the i128.drv Driver that is shipped with WinMe.
3. Forcing WinME to use other drivers has no effect.

It also doesn't matter what option for -vga was given to QEMU at command line.
cirrus, std, vmware, qxl etc. all have no effect, the videocard detected by Windows Me stays at Number Nine Imagine 128.

Even selecting another driver in WinME and forcing WinME to use drivers such as the Cirrus Logic 5446 PCI driver has no effect.

I also want to mention, that the BIOS isn't detected by WinME properly.
The device manager of WinME shows errors with the Plug & Play BIOS driver BIOS.vxd.

That is the QEMU Version:

# qemu-system-i386 --version
QEMU emulator version 2.0.0 (Debian 2.0.0+dfsg-2ubuntu1.3), Copyright (c) 2003-2008 Fabrice Bellard

And this was the complete command line, that was given:
# sudo /usr/bin/qemu-system-i386 -hda WinME_QEMU.img -cdrom drivers.iso -boot c -no-acpi -no-hpet -soundhw sb16 -net nic -cpu pentium3 -m 256 -vga cirrus

[Oliver (euro-cent)]

Here's a picture of the allowed color depth.
As long as the videocard isn't detected properly, using another driver won't help and without another driver the color depth stays at 16 colors.

[Oliver (euro-cent)]

Here's a screenshot of the driver problem, that WinME shows up.
It says error "code 23", whatever that means.

[Oliver (euro-cent)]

In console mode, info pci gives the following information (see attachted screenshot)

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Triaging old bug tickets... can you still reproduce this issue with the latest version of QEMU? Or could we close this ticket nowadays?

[Oliver (euro-cent)]

I am still using Kubuntu 16.04.3 LTS and that is shipped with QEMU 2.5.0

# qemu-system-i386 --version
QEMU emulator version 2.5.0 (Debian 1:2.5+dfsg-5ubuntu10.16)

I am not planning to go into the hassle to install QEMU latest on 16.04.3 LTS.

Could you delay the closing of the ticket until Kubuntu 18.04 LTS is released?
Then i could test it with the QEMU version that will be shipped with Kubuntu 18.04 LTS.

As an alternative, i could also do the test with QEMU 2.5 instead.

[Oliver (euro-cent)]

Addition to my last comment.

Ubuntu 17.10 is now shipped with QEMU 2.10. Thus we can expect that 18.04 LTS will be shipped with QEMU 2.10 or later, too.

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

This is an automated cleanup. This bug report has been moved to QEMU's
new bug tracker on gitlab.com and thus gets marked as 'expired' now.
Please continue with the discussion here:

 https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/108

[Thomas Huth (th-huth)]

Oliver, did you ever check this with a newer version of QEMU?