nanogui: Testing the 4 planes Vga Driver - Bare hardware
Subject:
RE: Testing the 4 planes Vga Driver - Bare hardware
From:
Greg Haerr ####@####.####
Date:
5 Oct 1999 20:03:49 -0000
Message-Id: <01BF0F3A.1EEBE880.greg@censoft.com>
: I am trying to test the "4-planes VGA driver" on a bare hardware.
: PC with a S3- Trio64 video card ( DELL GXM ).
:
Cool
: The code runs in protected mode and it does not have BIOS access.
The protected mode is no problem, since the vgaplan4 driver
runs under Linux ELKS. But the scr_bios wrapper requires that the
bios be called to init and deinit the graphics card. I never wrote
the routines to init the vga card, since they vary so much from
card to card. I have some routines that you could fiddle with
that attempt to program the vga hardware directly for initialization, if you want.
They are in David Bell's original mini-x code, in a file called ega.s, or something
like it. See ftp://microwindows.censoft.com/pub/mini-x get the file mini-x-new.tar.gz.
: : It would be nice if a test driver for each "driver" ( Video, Kdb, Mouse )
: could be written. The file mou_ser.c has a main() routine that
: works as a test driver. It a start there. It was nice to test the
: mouse driver.
It would be fairly easy to write a #ifdef TEST main() routine
for the video driver. Perhaps you could do it for the working linux screen
driver, and then integrate Bell's ega startup code. If you send me the changes,
I'll add them to the release, and test your test code with other drivers.
:
: For the video, I was expecting some BSOD ( Blue Screen of Death ) or
: something like that. I guess this is not Windows. :-)
Blue screen of death???!! MicroWindows doesn't need that feature,
since it doesn't have any bugs ;-)
:
: Did anybody test this driver recently ?
: If so, please give me some ideas how should I go about and test it.
:
Like I mentioned, the scr_bios wrapper around vgaplan.c needs to be
slightly rewritten. If you set #define HWINIT 1, then you can just write two
replacement bios routiones, ega_hwinit(), and ega_hwterm(). Other than that,
the driver is used under the ELKS build currently.
Greg
