On Sat, 08 Dec 2001 03:14:28 +0000, Bill wrote:
> I tried installing a G450 AGP in place of my Rage Pro in my desktop
> machine at work recently, and was unable to get a picture from the
> Matrox card. It appeared from the server log that the driver couldn't
> find the BIOS on the card.
>
> I'm unable to make this the primary card as the BIOS in the machine
> doesn't offer a choice of where to boot VGA from; it's always the PCI
> card that comes up as primary video.
>
> A bit of poking around in the code showed the driver was not actually
> reading the BIOS, but it wasn't too obvious why; there was (and still
> is) a comment:
>
> "Warning! This code currently does not detect a video BIOS"
>
> It looks as though the code has changed a little since I tried this,
> but the comment is still there. Is this a limitation of the hardware
> or could I (or someone who has documentation) repair this? Would it
> be as simple as changing a few constants to suit the G4xx cards -- is
> the BIOS signature in a different place, or a little different? I'm
> not averse to experimenting.
>
> Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'm eager to get this
> to work as the ATI card struggles a little at 1600x1200x32@85 ;o)
> although it beats some other similar-aged cards I've tried hollow.
I'm currently running a machine with G450AGP+G450PCI, and the
secondary card (no matter AGP or PCI) is always nonfunctional with
XFree86 driver. To solve the problem I had to use Matrox HAL module,
which knows how to initialize the card itself.
Unfortunately, there are two bugs with HAL module. First, after
switching to console and back, the first screen of the secondary card
isn't working (according to the monitor, there are some wrong clocks).
Second, even with a single-card, the recent Matrox driver makes 2nd head
jitter (or whatever the right term is).
I really hope that XFree86 support for recent Matrox cards becomes
better, but as to now it seems that there is no maintainer for mga driver,
and there was no reaction from Matrox.
_________________________________________
Dmitry Yu. Bolkhovityanov
The Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics
Novosibirsk, Russia
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