Subject: Re: Garbled characters in 800x600 and above
To: Ale Terlevich <A.I.Terlevich@durham.ac.uk>
From: Olly Betts <olly@muscat.co.uk>
List: port-arm32
Date: 02/17/1997 14:09:20
Ale Terlevich wrote:
>On Mon, 17 Feb 1997, Olly Betts wrote:
>> * Make sure you don't dislodge the metal clips holding in the floppy and
>>   existing hard drives.  I knocked off the floppy one and as a result
>>   trashed a floppy trying to write a rootdisk with a vibrating drive.
>
>  My floppy is screwed into place and also came with a metal clip over 
>the top.  I took the metal clip off to hold down my second internal HD 
>(two years ago) and have never had any problems with either rhe floppy or 
>HD drive in desktop or tower modes.

Hmm, I guess my Risc PC has a screw loose then.  I didn't check closely, but it
looked like the floppy drive was only held in by the clip.  It definitely made
a nasty vibrating noise until I replaced the clip, and trashed the floppy in
the process.

>> * I can't boot into 800x600 (which my monitor can certainly cope with) or
>>   1024x768 (which I think works).  640x480 works OK.  What I get it the
>>   higher resolution modes is the character set wrapped round about half a
>>   character + random coloured garbage at the bottom of the screen.
>
>  The kernels on the FTP site are compiled with a AKF65 MDF (I think) and 
>it has to use a mode from this on bootup.

Then the bootloader ought not default to X1024 Y768 C256 if that isn't in the
file.  The problem I saw was certainly more than just a monitor with the wrong
timings.  The display was steady with consistant character corruption and
coloured garbage.  Perhaps it could be that the code tries to find the mode in
the compiled in monitor file, but if it fails uses a slightly garbled
configuration?

>> BTW, I've set up a searchable index of the mailing list archive (since I
>
>  Now that's an excellent idea.  I'll have to check it out!

Oh, I forgot to say -- please don't put links to the index in other pages until
I've fettled it into a better state.  Feel free to use it though.

Cheers,
Olly