on 2/26/00 8:55 PM, Bill Studenmund at wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov wrote:

>> Hmm, but doesn't XFree86 already have drivers for just about every video
>> card that you could want to shove in a PCI slot? Does anyone know if the
>> XClaimVR is the exact same card as the All in Wonder Pro, only with OF
>> support? Since I'm connected to a VGA monitor, it doesn't do mac autosense
>> and I'm always at 1024x768 at 60 Hz (yuck!), X sure is snappy though :)

    As a general note to those reading along, I think I have figured out to
switch video modes/resolutions from the cards own support list. I didn't
actually boot NetBSD to X to see if it would work because the display got
corrupted. Here's what I did:

/dev/ATY,XCLAIMVRPro@D

words
    in which show-modes caught my eye, sure enough it lists all the video
modes the *CARD* is capable of using and whether they are disabled (to
what?) and what the current video mode is, along with resolutions, and
horizontal sync rate? (6500 MHz IIRC for 1024x768). From there I messed
around with the available words and trying to figure out syntax (I know 0
forth) and by typing the following for video mode A:

0> A enable-videomode ok
0> A set-mode

    At which point the screen clears, and I get corrupted/garbled text that
I could barely make out the dots. Then I did B set-mode (which was the
original boot-up setting), and the screen cleared and returned to normal
text. Doing a .properties also tells you the current bit-rate (I'm sure that
will come in handy later)

    I was curious about the other commands like set-colors and most
interested in draw-logo :) Can we draw the cool spinning 3D ATI logo that
the PC systems get a system boot up?! If its a user-loadable graphic or
better yet, graphic sequence, could we sneak a NetBSD logo in there? :)

    This card seems to have incredibly complete OF support, I didn't get
more than two commands from the internal ATI Rage II chipset on the
motherboard of my Beige G3, but that is likely due to the fact that I didn't
have a monitor connected, but I'll have to try that later. When I shut down
here I'm going to try booting to X in another videomode and see what happens
when NetBSD grabs hold of the OF console and see if the text is readable,
and of course what happens in X. Does anyone have a developer account with
ATI? I can see this coming in handy later on as ATI is going to be in
(correct me if I'm wrong) ever Mac since the Beige G3's and the All-in-one
G3. My Rage II chip has DVD written on it, but I'm sure we're a long way off
from watching DVD's on out X desktops.


    Chris


> 
> Kinda. Many XFree86 drivers are Linux86-only, at least for everything
> before 3.9. Many assume little-endian, and a few (like the one for my
> Savage4 card in my i386) are Linux-only. So they don't "just work" on
> macppc. :-(
> 
> Take care,
> 
> Bill
> 



-- 
    "I use to be indecisive, now I'm not so sure..."