On Thu, Aug 17, 2006 at 10:52:05PM +0200, Lourens Veen wrote:
> On Thursday 17 August 2006 16:16, Frédéric Leroy wrote:
> > Le jeudi 17 août 2006 à 19:34 +0800, Rogelio Serrano a écrit :
> > > On 8/15/06, Frédéric Leroy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > > When reading post on fixed frequency monitor, I was wondering if
> > > > it could be worth to have a "bios configurator" ?
> > >
> > > Can the card work in systems without a pc style bios? what about
> > > efi based systems or openboot?
> >
> > IIUC the card is not tied to a platform, but you have to write a bios
> > to support a platform.
> >
> > The bios screen was just an idea to have a minimum requirement for
> > those who have fixed frequency monitors and want to make it work
> > quickly.
>
> But how are you going to display that bios screen of yours in a mode
> that the fixed frequency monitor supports? How do you determine which
> mode to use?
This is a solved problem. The SPI port is brought out to a header.
An external board can plug into the header through a ribbon cable. The ASIC
can read a raw binary image of the registers that control video modes from
the external board at boot time. A wide variety of lab tools could be
devised that plug into the SPI header and do different things, but the
simplest way of configuring a fixed-frequency video mode without relying on
another computer to program the tool, is a set of about 120 DIP switches
connected to a chain of shift registers. Shift registers are directly
compatible with SPI; in fact, SPI is designed around the properties of shift
registers. The parts cost for an SPI video mode initialization board comes
to about $35. It could be sold as both an accessory for PC users with
fixed-frequency monitors, and as a lab tool for developing embedded systems
that don't use X86 processors or BIOS.
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