On Wednesday 06 June 2001 10:04 pm, \"Håkan Thörngren\ wrote:
> I am considering building a machine around a CATS motherboard and have
> some questions..  I am new to PC hardware, having used mostly SUN
> workstations before.  Just so you understand my limited level of
> experience...
>
> How much memory can I put in a CATS?  It is listed as using 2 PC66
> DIMMs. Can I put 2 256MB PC100 DIMMs into it and have 512MB?
> These 256MB DIMMs are reasonably priced, larger memories appear to
> cost a lot more (today).

I've got 128MB in my CATS.  The problem with the CATS board is that's it's 
fairly picky on the type of RAM (or so I'm led to believe)

> Is there any high resolution graphics board available for it?  I would
> like something like 1600x1200 and 24 bit planes, or at least
> 1280x1024.  I want to work with photography, no fancy fast 3D
> rendering.  A quick browsing around and it seems to exist hardware
> that are capable enough, but are there any NetBSD ARM drivers
> available (or in the works) for such graphics boards?

The problem is how much the board expects to be in a PC.  IE the CATS bios 
emulates enough of an x86 processor to get the graphics card going.  So it 
comes down to trial and error in some respects.  There's also the issue of X 
server support.  I need to rebuild the X server with the cats patches in see 
if it'll work.  (the old X server I dug out seems to kill interrupts on my 
system (not had time to figure out why yet)  Certainly it'd be worth asking 
simtec directly (see http://www.simtec.co.uk/).  Or maybe ask stephen borril, 
he was selling some 2nd hand cats boards (which happily work)

I'd suspect that any graphics card that works on non-x86 PCI based hardware 
should be capable of running in the CATS, eg any graphics cards alpha and 
macppc might be a place to start.

Cheers,
Chris