On Sun, 2007-02-04 at 17:26 +1100, Russell Shaw wrote:
> Hi,
> Is there any place where the Vesa standards can be downloaded for free?

http://www.vesa.org

As you can see, there are many VESA standards:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA

The one you are probably interested in is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions

If you go to this page:  http://www.vesa.org/Standards/summaries.htm
you can click on the link in "Please click for a list of standards that
are available in PDF format for immediate download".  Just feed the form
some garbage data -- you are going to use a standard dummy email address
and password to get into the real download page.

What you want there is probably vbe3.pdf.

> I'm interested in 2D graphics rendering and thought about experimenting
> with X server drivers (i'm familiar with X server internals).

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pc-hardware-faq/supervga-programming/

> Are PCs running linux still limited to doing all the video memory
> accessing through one 64k window like vga?

No!  VESA introduced a protected mode interface a long time ago with VBE
2.0.  That allowed pretty much any program to access a flat frame buffer
on any machine as long as it used a DOS extender.  This was back in the
early nineties.  Borland was one of the suppliers of easy programming
environments that came with DOS extenders.

VBE 3.0 has a protocol that gives applications access to the some of the
acceleration functions that often were in the SVGA cards of the late
nineties.  I don't think it was ever widely implemented.

-Peter

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