On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, Jim Castleberry wrote:
> PseudoColor emulation to support multiple visuals seems like a good thing to have
> when the vast majority of supported hardware does not support overlays and lots
> of users have a need (and the competitive solutions support it, too).
>
> Why doesn't XFree86 support it? Is there some technical/strategic/political
> reason, or is it just a matter of nobody has gotten around to it yet?
I think your assertion that "alot of users have a need" isn't
correct. There is a small and shrinking need. Apps so old that they
understand only PseudoColor are rare and typically have other issues
accelerating their demise.
Solving the problem is either straight-forward (but a bit of work)
or extremely difficult depending on which class of hardware you are
trying to solve the problem on. If you don't want overlays and are
happy with this only supported on hardware that can handle DirectColor
visuals (and you can live with color flashing), it's not a difficult
solution. Adding the transparent pixel typical to overlay-based
systems or solving this problem on cards that can't do hardware
palette lookups in depth 24 is large task, however.
Either solution, the longer we wait, the less important it
becomes to implement. And I think the people capable of making these
modifications just don't have the time to spend on this. They'd
rather work on their huge todo-list of things that benefit a
larger set of people.
Mark.
>
> Jim
>
> Mark Vojkovich wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, Jim Castleberry wrote:
> >
> > > I have a Dell PC with an "NVidia Riva Ultra 64 rev 21" in it. I want it to offer
> > > multiple visuals so I can run old apps that only support 8-bit PseudoColor and
> > > still let other apps that can handle more colors have them.
> > >
> > > Everything I've found on Xfree86.org and elsewhere says it ain't possible -
> > > multiple visuals can't be supported without hardware overlay and only a few
> > > Matrox and newer NVIDIA cards have it.
> >
> > The newest NVIDIA cards have TrueColor overlays, not PseudoColor.
> >
> > >
> > > But I have another Dell PC containing an "NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 Model 64" that's
>running
> > > Windows 2k and Hummingbird Exceed, and xdpyinfo confirms that it supports 2
> > > visuals - 8-bit pseudocolor and 24-bit TrueColor.
> > >
> > > So what's up? Do these chips support overlay and only Hummingbird Exceed knows
> > > it, or is it actually possible to do multiple visuals without overlay?
> >
> > They emulate it. XFree86 doesn't support PseudoColor emulation.
> >
> > Mark.
> >
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