Dieter wrote:
I've never seen a common off the shelf graphics card that had jumpers
designed for setting unusual video modes.
So the junk in the big box stores gets something wrong, therefore you
want to get it wrong also?
A card that supports monitors that don't run 640x480 is a specialty
product. Such cards are available but not in big box stores.
In fact, what you're describing is a very vertical-market sort of
thing, almost into Tech Source's territory. If someone wants this,
they should expect to pay more money, in which case we can easily
accommodate them.
Something posted recently mentioned a price of $200 for the OGC
board. That's already pretty high for a framebuffer, and now
you're talking about charging extra for some header pins?
How many pins is going to be required to program an X11 modeline?
You need:
Vertical frame rate: 2 decimal digits
Horizontal scan rate: 3 decimal digits (2.1)
Vertical total lines: 3 decimal digits
Vertical visible lines: 3 decimal digits
Horizontal total pixels: 4 decimal digits
Horizontal visible pixels: 4 decimal digits
Horizontal sync delay: 2 decimal digits
that is a total of: 21 decimal digits. If you BCD this you would need
184 header pins. This just isn't practical.
A board that will drive any display is a great selling point, even
for buyers that plan to use a multisync monitor. Jumper pins are
an easy way to allow setting the mode without any special hardware.
Header pins don't add much to the cost. Ship the board with no
jumpers installed, which means assume a multisync monitor. Install
one jumper to mean use the software programmed mode. Need an odd
mode? See the docs and add jumpers.
There may be a negative to this, but I don't see it.
I don't really see having to set 84 jumper locations as a feature that
most users would like. We could use those neat BCD coding switches but
21 of them is going to be expensive.
Maybe there is a better way, but I don't see that either.
Having to set the Board up with a VGA monitor may not be a good
solution, but it is the best solution of those available.
--
JRT
_______________________________________________
Open-graphics mailing list
[email protected]
http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics
List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
