Date: 21 Sep 2002 17:18:49 +0930 From: "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au> To: Sean Hamilton <sh@planetquake.com> Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Direct video access Message-ID: <1032594530.893.2.camel@chowder.dons.net.au> In-Reply-To: <001001c2613e$a2a7fca0$911de8d8@slugabed.org> References: <001001c2613e$a2a7fca0$911de8d8@slugabed.org>
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On Sat, 2002-09-21 at 16:44, Sean Hamilton wrote: > 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. 3d support for nVidia stuff is still 'in the works' :( ATI or Matrox are probably your best bet, though support for their latest cards lag behind. You could try looking at SDL which seems to be becoming the de-facto standard for doing multimedia/game type stuff. > 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? If I were you I'd look at the DRI etc. Skip all of that messy stuff for directly touching video hardware :) You can get a framebuffer mapping (DGA in X, or magic syscons calls) without having to talk to the video card directly. -- Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au "The nice thing about standards is that there are so many of them to choose from." -- Andrew Tanenbaum GPG Fingerprint - 9A8C 569F 685A D928 5140 AE4B 319B 41F4 5D17 FDD5 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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