On Fri, 13 Feb 1998, Allison J Parent wrote:

> <What, exactly, do the ROM routines do, anyway?  If one could just access
> <the raw bitmap of the display, perhaps one could generate ones own
> <characters without using the ROM routines, mirrored or not?  This type
> <of access will be needed for the eventual X server anyway...
	 
	The video matrix starts at 0x38000000. Strictly progressive layout.

> Besides boot/console they also contain diagnostics and some utilities.  
> The terminal emulation is small and it also contains the character maps
> used for teminal emullation.  Someone familiar with vax internals could 
> code a better text terminal and include that in kernel space along with 
> the video bit maps so memory protects are not violated.  I'm sure doing 
> in kernel space has problems as it would be fairly large as it would also 
> have to include the character maps for at lease a basic font.  There are 
> details I may be missing but it's nto trivial as there would be some point 
> where the boot console is effectively gone and the system console takes 
> over.  That may upset the OS as the the error log goes there and and would 
> be "missing" for a period of time while the replacement console takes 
> over.
> 
> Allison
> 
>