On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Todd Vierling wrote:

> On Thu, 7 Jun 2001, Chris Tribo wrote:
> 
> :     Specifically, the problem isn't really writing things on the display,
> : but scrolling. None, if any OpenFirmware video card drivers enable much 2D
> : acceleration. If we had an accelerated raster console driver instead of
> : using OpenFirmware, things would probably be a lot faster. (as well as
> : allowing us to get rid of OFW once we've booted)
> :
> :     Most of the code for a raster console driver could probably be
> : shamelessly acquired from Xwindows, LinuxPPC, or Darwin source, if one were
> : so inclined, but there are other hurdles to overcome. i.e. the sheer number
> : of different and often undocumented video chips Apple shipped on different
> : revisions of the same motherboard.
> 
> It'd probably be possible to use the "vga* at pci?" attachment of wscons,
> retaining the OFW console for a fallback in the case that the video chip
> doesn't self-identify as VGA compatible....

	Does that require the said video card to have a VGA BIOS
in order to work? I seem to recall Tsubai saying that we couldn't get the
Mach 64 based ATI cards (and most earlier cards) to run XF 4.0.x on macppc
because they didn't have a VGA BIOS. I don't see why we couldn't compile a
list of timing paramaters for each of the older chips, that being the
case. Does vga* use text mode for the console?



	Chris