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Subject: Re: Specs on a Hitachi CM2085me monitor anybody ??
To: terry@lambert.org (Terry Lambert)
Date: Sat, 31 Aug 1996 19:54:39 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: sos@FreeBSD.org, durham@phaeton.artisoft.com, regnauld@tetard.glou.eu.org,
        hackers@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <199608311705.KAA04005@phaeton.artisoft.com> from Terry Lambert at "Aug 31, 96 10:05:58 am"
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In reply to Terry Lambert who wrote:
> > Hmm, I'm afraid there is no easy way out here. You can get a pointer
> > to the "standard" mode table (thats what syscons does), but setting
> > the card specific modes is (surprice) card specific..
> 
> The data about the card is simply not well abstracted from the code
> that implements the INT 10 interface.
> 
> And once again we discover why EE's should not be hired to write
> video BIOS.  If you could identify the card by looking at the INT 10
> BIOS entry point minus 16 for a manufacturer specific ID struct,
> and then decode that on a per manufacturer basis, then you could have
> external access to the mode tables and any other information.

I'm surpriced that it took so long before you jumped out of the box :)

I can tell you from experience, that it would be far worse if the
video BIOS was written by computer scientists, that way it
wouldn't fit into a ROM of earthly size.

> This problem is coming up so frequently, it's almost worth beating
> on the card manufacturers.  In two years, when Windows95 is on the
> junk heap and Microsoft is selling "NT Workstation" instead (that's
> about how long the Win32 interface is going to take to displace
> Win3.1 sufficiently), Microsoft is going to have the same problem.
> Already NT won't run on all hardware that 95 will (of course, we
> could argue about the VM interfaces I always go on about for FreeBSD
> as a fix for NT as well).

We can only hope that the presure that Micro$oft can muster, will
line up the videocard manufactures.


-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Søren Schmidt               (sos@FreeBSD.org)               FreeBSD Core Team
                Even more code to hack -- will it ever end
..