On Saturday, November 29, 2003, at 07:55  PM, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

> On Sat, 29 Nov 2003 kevdig@rcn.com wrote:
>
> That server uses whatever mode the Mac was left in by the Booter. It
> doesn't know anything about the hardware. If you're in "thousands of
> colors" when you run the Booter, or if you set the Booter to switch to
> 65,536 colors, you'll get 16-bit True Color (which is static color).
> If your Mac can't do 16-bit color, you're out of luck.

All true. We currently don't have support for any CLUT/DAC hardware on 
any on-board or nubus card video. Though, I've seen the Linux mac 68k 
stuff and it seems that somebody went to the trouble to at least put in 
basic CLUT/DAC support for most machines. We could probably use that as 
inspiration for our own stuff.

> You were looking for a programming project, weren't you...?
>
> "xfree4" builds and runs fine on mac68k, but no X server! It would be
> easy enough to drop Ken Nakata's server into the "xfree84"
> directories, but it would be way cooler to make it a loadable module
> to the "XFree86" new-style server. Then, real support for the hardware
> found on different Macs could be added bit-by-bit.

If anybody wants to start work on a project to add support for a 
particular machine let me know what machine it is and I can probably 
pass on some info and/or tips. I used to work on internal video for 
NetBSD and I collected A LOT of information but I never got enough time 
to put the information to work in a good set of video drivers. It's 
really a pain because each video chipset has it's own little set of 
quirks and the NetBSD mac68k video interface has gone through a few 
interesting changes. Worse, it can be tough to have consistent access 
to all the hardware I needed to reverse engineer and test.

Most mac68k's seem to be running mostly as servers now so the incentive 
to work on video drivers is kind of low right now. To say nothing of 
the fact that most machines only offer framebuffers, so any 
expectations for video performance should be pretty low. :-)

Again, though, if anybody needs info or tips, feel free to ask!

-- 
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  Michael Zucca - mrz5149@acm.org
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  "I'm too old to use Emacs." -- Rod MacDonald
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