On 24/10/2010 20:24, [email protected] wrote:
It strikes me that improving VGA font support could be a good project for some non-core developer to work on. The basics are there, sources are available. Meanwhile the core developers can work on OGC.
I think we should be able to change VGA font in the same way that any other VGA card can change font. Enough should be emulated to make this happen.
I agree that full VGA support would be really nice, but also see that it should never become the main-purpose of the OGD1 (or OGC).
For real VGA's (old ones) VGA was ultr-reliable because the hardware that implimented it was pretty stateless. You could easily reset the card and be back in text mode. The modern VGA's still apear to work like this, though I suspect they have an architecture that it much more like ours than appears at first (ie. That there is some sort of microcontroller / GPU doing a lot of the work, and more firmware than you can see). To get really "good" VGA support we have to write a _lot_ of firmware, and even then we won't get the speed, performace or reliablity of a pure hardware VGA. The thing is, we don't really need those things.
Having said that, I'd really like to play wolf 3D on an OGD1 - I think that would have great hack value.
Improving VBE support seems like a good goal though. It should be relativly easy to get 32-bit framebuffer modes working, and there is some support in the BIOS for that. Some PCs actually use a graphical GUI for configuration these days, and I assume that they use VBE.
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