From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Russ Cox" To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] Re: Ati Xpert 98 Video card MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20001121154029.C4DA4199E4@mail.cse.psu.edu> Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 10:40:28 -0500 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 2e386846-eac9-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 flickers on the screen can be fixed by trying lower resolutions or refresh rates. it really means that we're not setting the memory parameters correctly, but the easiest work-around is to not push the memory so hard. vga is a very hard problem. oddly enough the ati cards do have the best support, because we have the most complete documentation for them. but even that's not everything we need to know. the cards with the "best support" are usually the cards with the most recently written driver, since the contemporary cards have not had a chance to diverge from what was used to write the driver. the main problem is that vendors think it's sufficient to release a windows driver rather than real documentation. if you pick a random card and hope it will work, your chances are best if that vendor is ati. that said, the savage4-based cards seem to be working quite nicely. i have a stalled vga rewrite that addresses a few problems and adds some control of various common features found on laptops, but getting vgas working is an inherently ad hoc process and no amount of rewriting will get rid of that aspect completely. russ