> And the Texas Instruments TVP4020 [Permedia 2]
Cool!
> Do you know where I'd need to start to get an ATI Rage XL chip working?
> It is the onboard video controller for the Dual-Athlon board, and I would
> like to get it working.
The first step is getting a working devfb; there is a devfb for Rage128,
but I don't know if it works for the Rage XL as well. Jeff Garzik is the
master in this realm (do you know his email?). As I recall, it looked
easy enough to write a generic fb that was slow from fbgen.c, but I never
tried it. Hopefully the ATI FB driver will work.
The next step is getting the big, thick, programmer's reference manual to
figure out how to init the card. Garzik had the GD5480 manual lying
around when I asked him -- he may have the Rage manual as well.
Otherwise, it looks as though ati.com has an OK developer's program for
manuals and such. I signed up so hopefully I'll be able to fetch docs
soon.
The final step is initialization. If the docs don't say enough, I may be
able to reverse engi..., er, I mean, "interpret" the current BIOS to see
how this is done. It should be easy; I'll just step up to the video BIOS
init and step through the instructions until my flatpanel receives a sync
signal. The previous instruction would then be "power-on". Because it
probably uses SRAM, RAM init is trivial (do bigger 64MB cards use DRAM?).
If you want me to do this, tell me an otherwise working LinuxBIOS platform
with the ATI Rage XL that Ron has lying around.
Another possibly simpler but entirely untested approach would be to have X
start automatically and use the "second card VGA BIOS init" routines in
XFree 4. I know little about this approach besides we've considered it
and that supposedly X has an x86 emulator.
- James
