On Wednesday 13 March 2002 12:00, Gerald Champagne wrote: > I'd like to port a directfb system to a mips platform, and > I'm having some trouble locating a video card that will work > on a mips platform. I need a card that is pci-based and does > not require bios initialization (or it must be documented so > I can rewrite the initialization myself). Does anyone know > how to tell if a given video card requires bios support, or > how to know what the bios is doing? > > Actually, I'd prefer to have a standard ntsc tv output if > possible, and I don't really need vga at all. Is there a simple > pci card that allows me to output an ntsc signal? My guess is > that if I can find something like this that's not a standard > video card, it won't require bios support. > > Any suggestions? Any ideas where to look?
If you're not using a custom sillicon MIPS chip, then the best place to contact is probably the CPU manufacturer. I know that NEC was using a setup exactly like you describe on one of their dev boards. The higer end NEC VRXXXX chips don't come with a LCD controller built in, because they are designed for set-top box development. (The Rockhopper Vr5432) I don't know if off the shelf cards will work, but one avenue to explore is contacting some community people that are hacking settop boxes like TiVO and find out what video controller is used there. (Or replay, or...) The early versions of TiVO were based on MIPs I'm pretty sure (they hired some people from the Linux-VR group, so...). If you find a controller they are using, then look to see if you can find a standard PCI card that uses that controller. Then get to work on modifying it for your purposes. Thanks, Shane Nay. (Oh, my friend Fred Finster that used to work at NEC said the PCI card they used on the Rockhopper was "Tvia 50XX card is a cyberpro 5050 on the board partnum 5000T1_4M_6LS_2_2". He also seems to think that you could use a more mainstream card if you wanted to.) -- Info: To unsubscribe send a mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe directfb-dev" as subject.
