In article <l03102805b03dd7427a17@[10.0.2.15]> you write:
> Just out of curiosity, do any older NetBSD releases support MGA? Is there
> any way that MGA support could be compiled into a kernel? There must be
> *some* other folks out there using decrepit video hardware...

Well, at least some decrepit hardware is supported.  I have a 386
running NetBSD with a CGA card! (it's waiting until I can figure out why
a S3 Trio64 card is behaving odly in another machine with XFree86 and
W95, so I can take the old ISA VGA card out of that one and put it in the
386. If anyone has experience with S3 cards leaving stray garbage
pixels, please let me know by private email).

Come to think of it, NetBSD is able to print stuff to your screen up
until that point, so it sounds like MGA is supported. I think XFree86
even has a MGA server, and there wouldn't be much point in that if you
couldn't even boot NetBSD on a machine with an MGA card.

(And by the M in MGA I mean "Monochrome", not "Matrox")

One thing to check with old video cards is non-obvious interrupt
conflicts.  I don't remember if MGA cards can be configured to
interrupt, but on the machine with the above-mentioned old ISA VGA card,
I had all sorts of problems until I realized that this card had a
vertical blank interrupt on IRQ2 (hardwired) and the on-board NCR scsi
was congigured for IRQ9 (==2) in the BIOS.  So, perhaps check if you
have any other hardware configured for 2 or 9, or see if the MGA card
uses interrupts and if so, can they be disabled.