Daniel Phillips wrote:
On Saturday 07 May 2005 16:47, Patrick McNamara wrote:I meant that in order for someone to use this card as the primary card on a normal (i.e. Not running Linux BIOS or something similar) x86 architecture PC we have to have a majority of the VGA registers present. You need them to display the BIOS menus, you need them to show the boot loader screen (text or graphics), you need it to install Windows, to show the Windows splash screen, until we have a well accepted fbdev driver, you will need it to boot linux, etc.
Daniel Phillips wrote:
On Saturday 07 May 2005 09:24, Patrick McNamara wrote:
I don't like VGA registers either. Even less now that I've beenDid you mean "most Windows systems"?
documenting what they actually do. Unfortunately, unless people
only want to use the card as a second head, we pretty much have to
implement some part of VGA. You have to have 640x480x4 available
to boot Windows. Very little text mode stuff actually uses INT10h
to do it's work. Most of it is done through direct access to
display memory. Yes, it sucks. Yes, I think we would all like to
be able to skip it. Unfortunately it's a necessary evil to build a
card that will work in most x86 systems.
I'm still wondering what you mean by "most x86 systems". Did you mean "most Windows systems" or "most of the systems of people we hope to sell to"?
We want as wide an audience as possible for this card. That unfortunately means making VGA work. Does it have to work immediately? No. It has to work before we spin an ASIC.
I agree with you. We have to treat the dev board and the graphics core as seperate projects. When the dev board is ready, it can be released, regardless of the state of the graphics core. You are then free to load any graphics core that we create, regardless of what works and doesn't. Release early, release often as folks say.I would not have any problem with the concept of delivering a logic upgrade to addBased on the project plan Timothy posted, the development hardware
Windows-bootability a few weeks after delivering a card configured
for testing/development as a non-bootable or linux-bootable-only
graphics card.
will be available well before there is a graphics card core to go on
it. It's not something you have to wait on to buy the development
board since the dev board is much more generic and a product in and
of itself. You can buy the development board as soon as it's
available. At some point in the future, there will be an image you
can load on it that will provide you a "working" video card. Before
that there will probably be a number of images that provide you a
"partially working" video card.
So does that mean you agree with me, or?
Regards,
Daniel
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