On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Andrew C Aitchison wrote: > On Sat, 31 May 2003, Tothwolf wrote: > > > I haven't been able to follow development lately, but is anyone > > actively working on adding IBM 526 support to the new S3 server? I > > have a number of Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM boards that use the S3 968 > > with an IBM 526, and I'd really like to put them to use. > > I'm not, as I don't have any such cards, but I consider it one of the > more interesting S3 cards, as the IBM 526 is one of the few chips which > supports 8+24 overlays.
They are pretty nice boards, though the 4MB of ram limits what you can do somewhat. You can still do far more with them than the typical 2MB cards from the same era. I noticed that the IBM 524 was also a popular DAC for the 968 cards, which leads me to believe that the 524 just lacks some of the extra features of the 526. Some of these boards I bought new back in 1996-97 or so, and I still remember what they originally cost ;) > I see that the i128 driver supports the IBM 526. I noticed that myself, but without documentation, I finally gave up trying to walk though the code. I think with docs, I could probably understand the old 3.x S3 server drivers enough to port quite a bit of code. Speaking of which, is there a comprehensive list of S3 chipset based cards anywhere? Such a list would be a very good starting point for collecting cards/documentation and porting/rewriting the drivers. I guess some of the reasons the drivers haven't been ported is a lack of cards and/or interest. S3 cards were extremely popular in the mid to late 1990s, and tons of the cards are still in use in older systems. Since XFree86 and Linux/*BSD run so well on those older systems, I really think its important to get the S3 code up to date. > I have detailed docs of the IBM 526 (and differences from the 524 and > 624) but my i128 has a SilverHammer DAC, which i128IDMDAC.c says is > essentially the same as the IBMRGBxxx DACs, but with fewer options and a > different reference frequency. > Do you know anything more about this chip? I know nearly nothing about the programming of DACs and such, but I'd still like to find docs. Worst case, I guess I'm going to have to learn to program them just to get my boards working. I have been told the 526 docs are more or less an add-on to the 524 docs. I also don't have docs for the 968, which I imagine I'll really need to find too. Getting docs from S3 will be nearly impossible, since they've likely disposed of such things. IBM tends to be a little better in that regard, so I may have to contact them. -Toth _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/devel
