From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Mar 7 09:11:12 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id JAA22094 for hackers-outgoing; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:11:12 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail1.infinet.com (mail1.infinet.com [206.103.240.3]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA22087 for ; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 09:11:00 -0800 (PST) Received: from donna (cmh-p100.infinet.com [206.103.242.106]) by mail1.infinet.com (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA20995; Thu, 7 Mar 1996 12:06:43 -0500 (EST) Message-ID: <313F18A8.3DBFAAF4@cylatech.com> Date: Thu, 07 Mar 1996 12:11:04 -0500 From: Wilson MacGyver Organization: CylaTech Inc. X-Mailer: Mozilla 2.0 (X11; I; Linux 1.2.13 i586) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: hackers@freebsd.org CC: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de Subject: Re: direct access to video card References: <199603070857.JAA16268@uriah.heep.sax.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk J Wunsch wrote: > You can mmap() the frame buffer, but have a look at the ten thousands > lines of code in the XFree86 Xserver that deal with every and each > hardware idiosyncrasy of the various not-really-compatible graphics > cards. I'm sure, you'll immediately give up your idea. > > Your best bet by the time the next release of XFree86/tm will be out > is to use their ``DGA'' (direct graphics access ?) Xserver extension. well, I'd really like to avoid using X if at all possible. The company I work for is working on a game (for DOS). As the developementing is progressing, I want to be able to first port what we've done to FreeBSD, and possbilly do my part of development on FreeBSD. The way I see it, first I'd have to implment a library to handle direct video access, much like the svgalib on Linux. And frankly, I'm lost as to where to start. For example, what funication call would I make to say, set the videocard to various mode? I suppose I could use inline asm within GCC. Though I rather not do that. -- Wilson MacGyver macgyver@cylatech.com -------------------------------------- Veni, Vidi, Concidi.