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Hello,

> I recently decided on a whim to stick a Trident ProVidia 9685 card 
> into my
> 7300. I didn't expect anything to happen, but lo and behold, it is
> recognized by OFW, NetBSD, and XFree86. OFW displays a device tree
> for it, I can 'dev' into its node, and it even looks like it has Apple 
> ROM
> drivers ("AAPL" something shows up under .properties). NetBSD also sees
> it, and binds wscons to it, though the display never gets initialized.
What do you mean by 'recognized' - can you get OF to display its 
console on the card? What does the device entry look like - pcixxxx or 
some proper name?

> The dissapointing thing is that, although XFree86 picks up on the 
> card, it
> can't seem to mmap the device. At least that's what it says. Sorry, I
> can't grab the error message at the moment.
That's a bug in XFree, or better - a design flaw. Lots of drivers use 
the vgahw module to talk to VGAish hardware but this module assumes a 
framebuffer at 0xa0000 which doesn't exist on macppc so mmap()ing it 
fails. The other problem is that it might need access to IO registers 
which isn't supported by current XFree. There's a workaround which 
needs changes in both the kernel and XFree though.

> So, is this normal behavior for an unspported video card, or is there 
> some
> possibility of getting this to work? If it would help, I can reply with
> the full XFree error log, and even the OFW device .properties.
NetBSD will pick up anything OF uses as console, it won't initialize 
any displays that weren't initialized by OF.

> I'm new to macppc, and would like to use X on this thing. It's fairly
> snappy, but Xmacppc hurts my eyes.
You could probably run XFree, but as I said - it requires some 
inofficial patches. And first you need to make OF use it as console ( 
setenv output-device /pci/whatever and so on )

good luck
Michael
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