On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 04:24:41 -0500, Daniel Phillips <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Friday 28 January 2005 08:08, Steven J. Hill wrote: > > Daniel Phillips wrote: > > > The only interesting part is the text mode initialization. Nothing > > > beyond 80x25 monochrome text is required, and that's just for > > > convenience so you don't need a custom kernel to boot. Personally, > > > I don't think it's worth supporting VESA modes at all. Since the > > > card specs are open, VESA support is pointless. This makes the > > > bios code very short and sweet. Only a fraction of Int15 has to be > > > supported on the PC. Other arches should be a piece of cake. > > > > Int15 being partially supported is fine, but again, that is for x86. > > What I think I am hearing is that since this card is completely open, > > nothing special has to be done for other architectures since we will > > be provided with all of the necessary initialization sequences. If > > that is the case, then as long as this card adheres to the PCI > > standard well, architectures other than x86 should be fine. > > There is no PCI standard for text display on a console. If you want to > see text at boot time before X sees the card, you have to do something > special for each architecture. I have no idea how this is handled for, > e.g., PPC but I'll look into it.
Well, we're familiar with a number of them. We've done consoles for HP PA-RISC, IBM PowerPC, Sun SPARC, and some others. I also did an x86 BIOS, but it didn't make it into a product. Yeah, they're all different. Some of them are documented well enough to be doable. :) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
