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Date:      Wed, 02 Jun 1999 17:54:09 -0400 (EDT)
From:      John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu>
To:        Kazutaka YOKOTA <yokota@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, John Baldwin <jobaldwi@smtp1.erols.com>
Subject:   Re: Extra text modes via vidcontrol...
Message-ID:  <XFMail.990602175409.jobaldwi@vt.edu>
In-Reply-To: <199906020524.OAA17278@zodiac.mech.utsunomiya-u.ac.jp>

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On 02-Jun-99 Kazutaka YOKOTA wrote:
> 
>>> 3. The video card doesn't support required graphics modes.
>>>    Run 'vidcontrol -i mode'  and see if the 320x200 256 color mode
>>>    is supported.  The vga driver in FreeBSD may not be able to support
>>>    all video modes, if the video card's BIOS is not as compatible as
>>>    it should be.
>>
>>I have a somewhat related question for you:  I cannot set many extended text
>>modes (80x60, 80x50, 132x50, etc.) even though they are listed in the output
>>from `vidcontrol -i mode`.  My card is a Matrox Millenium G200 AGP if that is
>>any help.  Any suggestions for getting all those modes to work?
> 
> These text modes with more than 25 lines require 8x8 font which is not
> loaded to the kernel by default.  You can load one of 8x8 font files in
> /usr/share/syscons/fonts via `vidcontrol -f _font_file_name_'.
> 
> You can automatically load font at boot time by editting
> /etc/rc.conf.local (3.1-RELEASE or later) or /rc/rc.conf (3.0-RELEASE
> or earlier includeing 2.2.X).

Duh..  Is this documented anywhere?  It might be nice if the vidcontrol man
page mentioned that certain modes required certain fonts, for instance.

>>Also, do you know of any chipsets that just don't 'work' with the VESA
>>support
>>for large splash screens?  We have a bunch of ATI Rage3D cards at my school
>>that won't load any splash screen above 320x200 even though they support VESA
>>2.0 and contain lots of video modes in their tables.
> 
> I don't have such list.  It is "chipset", but "BIOS" that matters.
> 
> Are you sure you enabled "options VM86" in the kernel configuration
> file and loaded the vesa module by the boot loader?

Yep, but I just checked the ouput of 'vidcontrol < /dev/ttyv0 -i mode' and even
with VM86 and VESA compiled into the kernel, the only 8-bit graphics mode is
320x200.. blech.  Guess all these cards just have crappy BIOS's.

> Would you tell me more about the bitmap file you are attempting to
> load?

Just a plain ol' 640x480x8 BMP. It does load fine on my workstation with a
Matrox G200 and on one of the servers at work that has a Cirrus chip.
 
> Kazu

---

John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu> -- http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/
PGP Key: http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/pgpkey.asc
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!"  -  http://www.freebsd.org


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