From: Sintsov Dmitri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Plex86 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, November 09, 2000 6:43 AM
Subject: Re: Peripheral considerations
> On Wed, 8 Nov 2000, Colin Davidson wrote:
> > The problem with full screen display adapters is that you have to
restore
> > them when you switch to the (an-?)other OS. This is very card-dependent
and
> > non-trivial. But don't apologize for your idea, it has sparked an
enormous
> > amount of very useful thinking.
> >
> How about full-screen VGA then? It's card-independent and to swicth back
> to host OS it probably could be possible to reinit GUI's vmode and redraw
> the whole desktop. Though I realize that perhaps nobody is interested in
> fast, full-screen VGA..
I'm quite interested in a fast, full-screen VGA. My ultmate wish for plex86
is
to be able to be running X, press Crtl-Alt-F9 to switch to windows '98, and
Crtl-Alt-F8 to switch back, without any other clue that I was ever in one
when I'm in the other.
However, I think that putting host-level video drivers into the plex86
project is a bad idea.
What I'd like to see is that plex86 provides full-screen video using SDL
or X. Indeed, we could provide "normal" text/CGA/EGA/VGA support,
and provide a windows video driver for our native mode -- which could
just be a small wrapper around the X protocol using MMIO.
Or we could have it be a dumb framebuffer, and use MIT-SHM.
Both of these assume that we can have a page or four that maps simply
in both host-space and guest-space, at a fixed address.
(I say X and not SDL because X is probably more popular, and better
defined. And hell, that way speed would be closer together <G>.)
-=- James Mastros
