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Date:      Sat, 21 Sep 2002 00:14:46 -0700
From:      "Sean Hamilton" <sh@planetquake.com>
To:        <hackers@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Direct video access
Message-ID:  <001001c2613e$a2a7fca0$911de8d8@slugabed.org>

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Greetings,

I have been doing graphics programming in Windows for a few years, and am
interested in broadening my horizons. I'm interested in attempting to get
FreeBSD to switch video modes and gain access to video memory, perhaps to
attempt a simple OpenGL-like implementation or the like, entirely foregoing
xfree86 and mesa.

Which card would I be best off using? I currently have an nvidia geforce256,
but understand nvidia is fairly hush-hush about how their hardware works. I
know nvidia is about to release an xfree86 module, but I'm not too
interested in using xf86. I hear ATI is somewhat more open about the
technical details of their cards.

For this card, where should I look to get details of the interface? I really
know nothing about talking directly to hardware, but am eager to learn. I am
assuming all cards have a standard set of commands to do things like set
video modes and possibly even things like hardware accelerated lines and
such, but I imagine things like matrix multiplications and transformations,
blitting, etc, are all proprietary. I know DOS uses a set of interrupts to
change video modes, and a static address for the framebuffer, but I'm
assuming this isn't the case with FreeBSD. If it *is* a static address,
would I then have to be running in kernel mode to access such an address?

Is this the inappropriate list for questions like this? freebsd-multimedia
looks more like userland type stuff...

thanks,

sh


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