Re: Simulating a lower resolution on the OLPC XO Laptop

2008-11-25 Thread Strider 
On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 12:52 PM, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 11:57:17AM +0100, Strider wrote:
> > The problem with this is that the laptop isn't powerful enugh
> > to handle fullscreen applications at this resolution.
>
> All those I have tried have worked fine at this resolution.  Which
> particular applications are you referring to?
>
> I've tried; konqueror, galeon, gpredict, xclock, firefox, emacs, xterm,
> inkscape, gimp, abiword, openoffice, wesnoth, and xastir.  I'm probably
> not using an application you're using.  Which is it?  Perhaps there is a
> design problem in the application.  Perhaps the application requires a
> display bandwidth that exceeds what is available.
>
> --
> James Cameronmailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://quozl.netrek.org/


It is indeed the applications that are in cause. I tried zsnes which is not
usable in other resolution than the original 256x224, I also ran the amiga
emulator e-uae which does not support upscaling but only resolution changes.

Other emulators such as dgen for the Sega Genesis or gnuboy for the game boy
have a software scaling option working really well. One solution would be to
patch each problematic application to support 1200x900 but it's will not be
possible with closed source software.
I'd also like to try to run games that ran on 1999's PCs such as Quake 3 and
Unreal Tournament, I think the laptop is powerful enough to run these games
at a 400x300 resolution but i doubt it will be smooth at 1200x900.

I have found this message :
http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-driver-geode/2008-August/000353.html on the
x.org mailing list and it might be what i'm talking about, I have to give it
a try.
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Simulating a lower resolution on the OLPC XO Laptop

2008-11-25 Thread Strider 
Hi,
I have a XO Laptop which is a nice machine machine with a high res display
of 1200x900 pixels. The problem with this is that the laptop isn't powerful
enugh to handle fullscreen applications at this resolution. If only the
display could switch to a lower resolution things would be much better but
it seems that this laptop only supports a single resolution.

So I was wondering if it would be possible of simulating lower res at a low
level, that is the xf86-video-geode driver.
I'm not an expert in video drivers but i imagine that there are functions to
request a pixel to be drawn on screen based on what's in the video ram.
Now let's say that it's not one pixel but two that we put on screen, and
that we draw each lines two times. That would result in a 600x450
resolution.
If we do the same thing but repating the operations three times , we would
have a 400x300 resolution.
Some emulators have a scale option to do such a thing and manage it quite
well, but if we had such an option in the video driver, the result would be
even faster !

So what do you think about this? Is it possible ?

Regards, Mathieu
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