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From: Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
Message-Id: <199608311705.KAA04005@phaeton.artisoft.com>
Subject: Re: Specs on a Hitachi CM2085me monitor anybody ??
To: sos@FreeBSD.org
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 10:05:58 -0700 (MST)
Cc: durham@phaeton.artisoft.com, regnauld@tetard.glou.eu.org,
        hackers@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199608310812.KAA22247@DeepCore.dk> from "sos@FreeBSD.org" at Aug 31, 96 10:12:41 am
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> Hmm, I'm afraid there is no easy way out here. You can get a pointer
> to the "standard" mode table (thats what syscons does), but setting
> the card specific modes is (surprice) card specific..

The data about the card is simply not well abstracted from the code
that implements the INT 10 interface.

And once again we discover why EE's should not be hired to write
video BIOS.  If you could identify the card by looking at the INT 10
BIOS entry point minus 16 for a manufacturer specific ID struct,
and then decode that on a per manufacturer basis, then you could have
external access to the mode tables and any other information.


This problem is coming up so frequently, it's almost worth beating
on the card manufacturers.  In two years, when Windows95 is on the
junk heap and Microsoft is selling "NT Workstation" instead (that's
about how long the Win32 interface is going to take to displace
Win3.1 sufficiently), Microsoft is going to have the same problem.
Already NT won't run on all hardware that 95 will (of course, we
could argue about the VM interfaces I always go on about for FreeBSD
as a fix for NT as well).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.