Uport 2.3 & Hercules cards

[Michael Grenier]

> 	Whilst ferreting through my release notes for microport unix
> 2.3, and the man pages for console & ansi, I noticed all these wonderful
> ways of flipping the screen into graphics mode. This usually consisted
> of escape sequences to do the trick. My question is,
> do they have this stuff running yet? And is it as straight forward as
> sending the appropriate escape sequence to do the switch and then
> attaching to the shared memory segment and doing our stuff?


For the hercules card, the escape sequences didn't work and I suspect
they won't for the other cards as well. See the first technical point in
the 2.3 release notes.

I have a complete version of plot(3x) running under Microport 2.3 for
the hercules card which I can send you as a beta customer if you want. 
I'm still completing work on it for the ega and to improve the speed
(The System V.2 assembler isn't the best and the docs are worse).  To
answer your above question, you have to initialize all the registers of
the 6845 to force graphics mode.  A good source of info on this and the
other cards is a book called "Programmer's Guide to PC and PS/2 Video
Systems" by Richard Wilton available through Microsoft press.  The
examples assume a DOS environment though.  Once graphics mode is set,
the microport drivers leave it alone until reset (actually the drivers
never play with those bits). If you can get it into graphics mode, the rest
is easy as the shmcreate, attach and other goodies seem to work great. 
Oh, you also have to grab the I/O port routines out of the /src directory
to set the 6845 registers.

    -Mike Grenier

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