On Mon, 18 Oct 2004, der Mouse wrote:

> > To clarify, I meant "my current setup" (with NetBSD) won't do
> > anything but 1-bit.  The monitor can.  (Do 1-bit monitors even exist?
> > How would you build something like that?)

> By processing the video signal with electronics designed for operation
> in the clipping region, with no attention paid to linearity, gain, or
> even exact location of the non-clipping ("linear") region.  (Amplifiers
> of this sort are commonly called logic gates.)

> There certainly have been monitors designed for 1bpp use, though
> whether they could be used for grayscale use by feeding them a suitable
> video signal is a matter I cannot more than speculate about.  I don't
> know of any mac68k examples (not that I would expect to, since I don't
> know that much about old Macs), but the Sun-3 world had them, for
> example the older monitors for use with the Sun-3/50 and Sun-3/60.


  OK, stupid question on my part, I guess.

  I remember that you could hack some digital RGB monitors to do analog,
which implies that modification was necessary, and I can see that might be
true for BW monitors too.  (On the other hand, you could also say they
"actually" can do analog..)


  Now, to get back on topic, how do I get the X server to operate in the
linear region?  And why is it that X doesn't already do grayscale?  Lack
of documentation?


Magnus