On Tue, 7 Nov 2006, Chris Schumann wrote:
[mailto:devel-admin@xxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Tim Roberts
chris@xxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I have an old ThinkPad 750P. It uses the WD90C24 chip, which was in
the old svga driver.
What would it take to port that to the new XFree86 code?
I'm not above
writing assembly code or digging in here, I just don't know
where to
start or how much effort it might take... swatting a fly or
eating an
elephant?
Holy moly! You have a whopping 1 megabyte of video RAM there.
Will it work with the VESA fb driver? If not, then you might
as well give up. I have the source code for their old
Windows 3.1 driver, and it is more than 76,000 lines of
16-bit x86 assembler. The blitter provided virtually no
acceleration, so you won't really be giving anything up to
use the fb driver.
This machine didn't quite get the VESA in firmware. It was
provided by a DOS TSR, which was required for the Win3.1 and
Win95 drivers. I thought it was for use with VESA, but now I'm
not sure.
Anyway, I don't think it's a good idea to require a DOS TSR
for video in Linux.
There is source for this chip somewhere in the annals of X
code. I think XFree86 supported it as late as 3.1.
3.3.6, actually.
The only mode I've seen with modern distributions is 320x200x1.
It's not pleasant.
I'd also like to get the pen interface to work on it, but one
step at a time! :)
So what's that next step?
You can start with reading the DESIGN document included in the distribution,
using the 3.3.6 pvga1 driver as a guide in filling in the blanks.
Marc.
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