Hi, I found a website www.realweasel.com - which has what i think is an excellent product! But $250-$350 per server is alot. Anyway, I got to thinking I want to build a simple pci or isa slot card that will read the video memory and output it to a serial console - thats it. I've purchased books on PCI and ISA architecture from amazon, im waiting for them to arrive. I have limited experience building cicuits using motorola microcontrollers but ive never built anything that connects to the pci or isa bus.

if anyone can recommend any books or websites on the subject of video output to pci/isa id appreciate it.

thanks

Clearly you've never done any real R&D. By the time you've bought 1000 from these people, probably at a discount since you're buying 1000, you still will not have spent as much as they probably have doing development. Look at the architecture of the board. The video to serial translation is the hard part. The rest is gravy.

Well, The video to serial shouldnt be too hard if i make the pc think the card is running in text only mode...

i dont plan on selling these so no buying in quantities of 1000's but i would build a custom one for each server.