On Fri, 6 Mar 1998 11:52:10 -0700 (MST)  Chris Jones wrote:

> On Fri, 6 Mar 1998, Chris Collins wrote:
> 
> > BTW, this framebuffer is driving a DEC Trinatron 20inch monitor at
> > 1280x1024 at 24bpp - so I really would like to be able to hang onto it.
> 
> On a vaguely related note, does anybody know if there are video cards out
> there for i386 machines that will do the necessary sync-on-green and
> whatever else is necessary to support these old DECStation monitors?  For
> that matter, what *does* the video card have to do to work with one of
> these monitors?

In a nutshell, you should be able to get X working ok, but not much else
(include Windows, etc).  With "normal" BIOS screens your video card wont
synchronise to your screen.  There are some graphics cards out there
that propose to work with single frequency monitors, but I've tried one
and not had that much success.  (They do sort of work, but only just, in
my experience.)

With the specifications of the monitor, you should be able to build up
a config line for an XFree86 server to talk to the screen.  You then
should configure your system to start X when it boots.  Until X actually
starts, you'll see all sorts of out-of-sync gibberish, then hopefully
your nice X display.

This is a bit vague, and it's been a long time since I've done
this.  But I should be able to dig up some info (hi Dave!).
Another place where this sort of question pops up all the time is
comp.sys.sun.hardware.  You'll also see many replies to the question
from the vendors of the special video cards I was talking about.

Simon.