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Hello,

>  I used one of these SPARC-5s in about 1997, when they were "brand
>  new."
> I was very excited to get a 24-bit video Sun, because i'd never had a
> 24-bit frame buffer in a Sun before.  (They existed, but i didn't work
> anywhere where i had access to one.)
>=20
>  In my experiences, running Solaris 2.5.1, 2.6, or 2.7, this frame
>  buffer
> was painfully slow.  I found a TGX+ SBus frame buffer and a spare
> monitor, and attached them to the same box, so i had a "fast screen"
> as well as the slow S24 "colorful screen."

Yeah, the TGX+ is a speedy little bugger. Unlike the TCX it has a real
drawing engine and a blitter. Too bad there's no documentation about the
geometry engine - supposedly it does matrix operations on floatpoint
values, could be fun to abuse it for other stuff ;)

>  Perhaps the old Solaris driver was written badly, but from the
> discussion, it sounds like the card was also oddly designed.

'oddly designed' is putting it mildly. All drawing / blitting operations
have to be done by the CPU, the hardware only offers a few tricks to
fiddle more pixels per 64bit access than you can fit into a 64bit word.

have fun
Michael

--Signature_Sun__12_Feb_2006_00_17_49_-0500_ruor_Aiffe+uVJy.
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