I disagree -- VGA is not inherently broken (unless you count its
rather limited capabilities and random feature set as broken.) EGA
was (write-only registers), but IBM actually wised up on that one.
It is perfectly possible -- and not even very hard -- to query and
restore the complete state of a VGA card. Unfortunately, some
graphics chip manufacturers didn't carry this on. I am truly
surprised to hear there are chips you can't even force into a known
state without a bus reset -- whomever came up with that one should be
shot, tortured, and then *really* hurt... c'mon, folks, it ain't that
hard to give your thing a card-specific reset if you have to... *sigh*
-hpa
-- PGP: 2047/2A960705 BA 03 D3 2C 14 A8 A8 BD 1E DF FE 69 EE 35 BD 74 See http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/ for web page and full PGP public key I am Bahá'í -- ask me about it or see http://www.bahai.org/ "To love another person is to see the face of God." -- Les Misérables