Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 19:54:39 +0200 (MET DST) From: sos@FreeBSD.org To: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert) Cc: sos@FreeBSD.org, durham@phaeton.artisoft.com, regnauld@tetard.glou.eu.org, hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Specs on a Hitachi CM2085me monitor anybody ?? Message-ID: <199608311754.TAA23908@DeepCore.dk> In-Reply-To: <199608311705.KAA04005@phaeton.artisoft.com> from Terry Lambert at "Aug 31, 96 10:05:58 am"
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In reply to Terry Lambert who wrote: > > 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. I'm surpriced that it took so long before you jumped out of the box :) I can tell you from experience, that it would be far worse if the video BIOS was written by computer scientists, that way it wouldn't fit into a ROM of earthly size. > 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). We can only hope that the presure that Micro$oft can muster, will line up the videocard manufactures. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Søren Schmidt (sos@FreeBSD.org) FreeBSD Core Team Even more code to hack -- will it ever end ..
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