> Video cards don't work the way you wish they did. They have read-only
> registers, locked and hidden registers, and many complicated settings.
> You can't just set textmode. If you try, you will get the video card
> into some useless state and maybe even flatline your monitor. There is
> no magic reset command. To return to textmode, you might need to turn
> off the accelerator, change several write-only registers, lock and
> unlock other registers, change more write-only registers, move a
> register window, read something from a register which you XOR with
> something saved when you set up the card then write into a different
> write-only register... It's really gross and it won't work if you don't
> know the complete state of the video hardware.
Sigh. Reading that dreadfully accurate dissertation makes me want to say
"hang the sense of it and stick a monolithic /dev/video in the kernel,
complete with 9x14 font". But we can't really do that, not if we want to
please most folks. So let's just get GGI working and use that.
-- Kenneth Albanowski (kjahds@kjahds.com, CIS: 70705,126)