Make sure that whatever you do is protected-mode compatible, PLEASE!!!!
Drew Northup, N1XIM
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf
> Of James Mastros
> Sent: Tuesday, November 28, 2000 4:07 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: [plex86] Video architecture
>
>
> Here's my current take:
> Use VESA's VBE (http://www.vesa.org/vbe3.pdf) to talk to the host from
> within guest space.
> Advantages:
> VBE maps simply onto SDL.
> VBE is a well-defined hardware interface.
> A fair number of apps will support VBE without us writing a driver at all.
> All the special handling needed is INT 10 being redirected to the
> user-space
> monitor on the host, and then handled by the GUI plugin, which needs to be
> able to rw into the guest space (into selections that are writable with
> native guest writes).
> We could allow PM interfaces that VBE gives as optional in PM trivialy,
> since we won't really be running inside the host at all.
>
> Disadvantages:
> Not quite as fast as speaking SDL directly. But SDL is a
> library, not a hw
> standard anyway; it doesn't make sense to speak it directly, any more then
> you can speak written Japanese[1] directly -- you need to map the
> idiograms/funtions into sounds/interrupts.
>
> VBE still doesn't give us a spec for HW accel stuff. We could use VBE/AF
> (Accelerated Functions) for that part, which looks like a good
> spec, but is
> expensive and not well supported. I'm looking around at stuff for that.
>
> VBE dosn't spec 3d stuff at all. I suggest that we make VBE OEM extention
> that translates OpenGL into somthing VBE-like (IE a hardware spec, not a
> library). That would make it trivial to write OpenGL drivers, and after
> you've got an OpenGL driver, there's a generic Direct3D driver
> that will work.
>
>
> Anybody else have some pros or cons? It looks to me like the
> pros outweigh
> the cons.
>
> -=- James Mastros
>
> [1] Beg pardon to anybody who remembers what subset of Japanese is
> idiographic -- I'm not even certian that I mean Japanese and not
> a Chinese.
>
> --
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