Re: SVGA kernel chipset drivers.

David E A Wilson (david@cs.uow.edu.au)
Mon, 3 Jun 1996 10:09:01 +1000 (EST)

On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>Finally, IO port acccess is not at all less critical. As far as I know,
>there are _no_ PC graphics cards that you can really program without
>using IO ports. Stuff like colourmaps etc are almost invariably done with
>IO port access on PC's.

I believe that I have such a card - an Eizo MD-B09 TMS34010 based card driving
a 21" monochrome monitor. The interface between the ISA bus and the display
(when not emulating a CGA/MDA/HGC) is a 4KB memory window in the upper memory
area (C0000..DFFFF). True, my card has no colormaps but other cards in the
series (MD-B08 or MD-B10?) do support color monitors. These are all TIGA cards,
quite high end in their day but now it seems that VLB/PCI SVGA cards can exceed
their performance.

If anyone has any information on programming such a card I would be greatful
if they could get in touch with me. It seems a shame not to be able to use
this card to any effect under Linux when I get a 1664x1200 desktop under Win
3.11. It co-exists quite well with my color SVGA card & monitor.

-- 
David Wilson	Dept CompSci Uni Wollongong Australia	david@cs.uow.edu.au