On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, James Hendricks wrote:
> The next step is getting the big, thick, programmer's reference manual to
> figure out how to init the card. Garzik had the GD5480 manual lying
> around when I asked him -- he may have the Rage manual as well.
> Otherwise, it looks as though ati.com has an OK developer's program for
> manuals and such. I signed up so hopefully I'll be able to fetch docs
> soon.
I'm thinking of trying the Riva128 (in a Diamond Viper 330). The
problem is, do I have to ask nVidia for the docs? I did a search but
all related pages link to 'https://www.nvidia.com/...' and
www.nvidia.com does not respond to https (or does it and I'm just
cut out???).
> The final step is initialization. If the docs don't say enough, I may be
> able to reverse engi..., er, I mean, "interpret" the current BIOS to see
> how this is done. It should be easy; I'll just step up to the video BIOS
> init and step through the instructions until my flatpanel receives a sync
> signal. The previous instruction would then be "power-on". Because it
> probably uses SRAM, RAM init is trivial (do bigger 64MB cards use DRAM?).
> If you want me to do this, tell me an otherwise working LinuxBIOS platform
> with the ATI Rage XL that Ron has lying around.
I'm thinking of 'interpreting' as well, especially if I find no
docs. Problem is I don't have an ICE, so I work on dead dumps... :-(
BTW, it seems to me that reverse engineering is OK (legally, I
mean). Is it so?
> Another possibly simpler but entirely untested approach would be to have X
> start automatically and use the "second card VGA BIOS init" routines in
> XFree 4. I know little about this approach besides we've considered it
> and that supposedly X has an x86 emulator.
I'd rather go and by a VGA card I know how to program than do
this. I think it will a source of problems.
Stefanoss
