From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jmk@plan9.bell-labs.com
To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu
Subject: Re: [9fans] VGA Hell, what else?!
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Date: Thu,  7 Dec 2000 23:25:09 -0500
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George Michaelson <ggm@dstc.edu.au>
	ok second take. during install phases, M$ drives the screen as a 640x480
	take-it-or-leave-it or is it even CGA 320x240?

	this implies all cards have some level of activity which works and supplies
	both bitmap and ASCII text services. 16 colours. flickery as hell. 

	wouldn't it make sense to wire the plan9 install floppies to this instead
	of any yeubeut higher-res, and do higher-res as a post-install?

Until aux/vga runs, the screen is in CGA mode, that's an 80 character wide
by 25 line text mode. You can do graphics in it and the Plan 9 2nd Edition
release did exactly that during the install phases. However, the predominant
depths used for graphics in the 2nd Edition were 1 and 4 bits, i.e. there wasn't
much colour. We were told often that we were not colourful enough so we ported
back the graphics model we did for Inferno, which was 8 bits deep and abandoned
the older stuff. Was that the right choice? I don't know but I'm happy enough
in that I don't need colour for what I do (I'm in CGA mode half the time).
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to have the NVIDIA and 3Dlabs cards I have lying
on the shelf working with Plan 9, but I don't have the time or inclination to
reverse-engineer an XFree86 driver without documentation. Does anyone else?

--jim