Need ODT help: non-standard SVGA on Open Desktop

Erik Fortune erik at westworld.esd.sgi.com
Fri May 4 10:59:38 AEST 1990


I'm running Open Desktop on a 33mhz 386 machine.  So far, 
I'm quite happy with it; congratulations, SCO -- nice system.

I have 1meg (yes, 1 meg) VGA made by Ahead Systems
with *lots* of extended VGA modes, including 
      800x600x{16,256}, and
      1024x768x{16,256}

Needless to say, this VGA is not supported.   I've been
using it in one of the IBM modes and it works fine, but
I have all this great video memory going to waste.

I'd like to get it to work in any of the higher resolution
modes (1024x768x256 would be ideal, but 16 colors is acceptable).   
The documentation is a little incomplete.   The Xsight(X) man
page says to see my operating system documentation for info
about adding support for new VGAs.   The Administrator's guide
only has one reference in the ODT-VIEW doc that suggests that
it is possible to add support for a new VGA without writing C code,
but doesn't shed much light on how one would go about doing it.

I've located a bunch of grafinfo files, and made a few attempts
to reverse engineer one of the existing files, but I don't know
enough about VGAs or these files to make much progress.  Is what
I want to do possible?    Am I looking in the right place?
Where can I find the documentation I need?  I grok graphics hardware
in general, but not VGAs in any detail, if that matters.

Please respond to me directly to erik at sgi.com and I'll summarize.   

Thanks in advance,
    Erik

p.s.  Anyone know if the ODT development system is shipping?



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