HI all,
After a very long pause i have restarted work to SOL OS.
Expect a new version with ATA HDD support soon.
SOL OS requires VESA 2.0 and/or a valid LFB for GFX.
I wanted to test it on my laptop also... but yufortunately my old Omnibook 800CT laptop uses a Neomagic MagiGraph 128PCI video card (because it has very little power consumption).
It only has VESA 1.2, 800+Kb video RAM and no LFB available.
I tried searching the web for a piece of code that will do bank switching for this kind of video card...but failed (damn i had found it a long time ago and lost it again)..
SO if anybody here knowes how i could switch banks on such kind of video card?
in ASM if possible but hey any C/C++ code or information will do...
Thank you
After a very long pause i have restarted work to SOL OS.
Expect a new version with ATA HDD support soon.
SOL OS requires VESA 2.0 and/or a valid LFB for GFX.
I wanted to test it on my laptop also... but yufortunately my old Omnibook 800CT laptop uses a Neomagic MagiGraph 128PCI video card (because it has very little power consumption).
It only has VESA 1.2, 800+Kb video RAM and no LFB available.
I tried searching the web for a piece of code that will do bank switching for this kind of video card...but failed (damn i had found it a long time ago and lost it again)..
SO if anybody here knowes how i could switch banks on such kind of video card?
in ASM if possible but hey any C/C++ code or information will do...
Thank you
Does it work on VMware now?
That would be a great plus, because it would be a lot easier to test it then...
It would be nice if you can test your newest version on the 4.x release candidate trial of VMware.
That would be a great plus, because it would be a lot easier to test it then...
It would be nice if you can test your newest version on the 4.x release candidate trial of VMware.
Get this source file of an older XFree release:
ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/XFree86/3.3.6/source/X336src-1.tgz
Unpack it and search the tree for "*bank.s"
It also contains the file "xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/vga256/drivers/neo/neo_bank.s" which does what you asked for (bank switching for Neo Graphic Cards).
Hope that helps!
ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/XFree86/3.3.6/source/X336src-1.tgz
Unpack it and search the tree for "*bank.s"
/*
* These are here the very lowlevel VGA bankswitching routines.
* The segment to switch to is passed via %eax. Only %eax and %edx my be used
* without saving the original contents.
*
* WHY ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE ???
*
* These routines must be callable by other assembly routines. But I don't
* want to have the overhead of pushing and poping the normal stack-frame.
*/
It also contains the file "xc/programs/Xserver/hw/xfree86/vga256/drivers/neo/neo_bank.s" which does what you asked for (bank switching for Neo Graphic Cards).
Hope that helps!
Hi,
Thanks for the link i will try that
It can not work on WMVare because they do not support VESA 2.0 :P
I think i will make a standard VGA video driver sometime in the future but until then... arghh messing with color planes will be fun ...
However it is quite "safe" to test it on any PC from a boot floppy ... i have tested it many times and never had any problems i could not solve via a reset.
Things will not be that sure anymore when i start playing with ATA HDD drivers
Anyway it will be read-only for a long time
No many improvements... because i just took a long pause.
I have updated the site a little and will continue to do so
Thanks for the link i will try that
It can not work on WMVare because they do not support VESA 2.0 :P
I think i will make a standard VGA video driver sometime in the future but until then... arghh messing with color planes will be fun ...
However it is quite "safe" to test it on any PC from a boot floppy ... i have tested it many times and never had any problems i could not solve via a reset.
Things will not be that sure anymore when i start playing with ATA HDD drivers
Anyway it will be read-only for a long time
No many improvements... because i just took a long pause.
I have updated the site a little and will continue to do so
Hi Bogdan, you wrote:
Things will not be that sure anymore when i start playing with ATA HDD drivers
Anyway it will be read-only for a long time
PIO or UDMA mode? Do you have docs on the latter? (is it pretty standard, or very chipset-dependent?)Anyway it will be read-only for a long time
It can not work on WMVare because they do not support VESA 2.0 :P
It may work under the new VMWare 4.0, since they supposedly added an emulated VESA BIOS, although I haven't played around with it.
----
Domain
It may work under the new VMWare 4.0, since they supposedly added an emulated VESA BIOS, although I haven't played around with it.
----
Domain
Thats why I asked to test with the newest Version.
Whoops,
Sorry, i've been doing 18 hour days for the past two weeks, I guess its catching up on me :o
-----
Domain
Sorry, i've been doing 18 hour days for the past two weeks, I guess its catching up on me :o
-----
Domain
doesn't vesa1.2 have support for bankswitching? Or was that only added in 2.0?
As for "doesn't support LFB", it doesn't take very much code to emulate LFB on a bankswitched card when you have paging up and running.
As for "doesn't support LFB", it doesn't take very much code to emulate LFB on a bankswitched card when you have paging up and running.
I said I was going to write some OPL (Fm synth code) for your OS, but I haven't got to it, you told me to have a standards (such as init, detect etc.) routine , but trust me my code will be next to garbage if I don't have some sort of guideline to follow!! Also it will use my SBI instrument loader (with alot of instruments on my drive), so some other clever programmer can probably write a MIDI driver.