Re: fb with S3 Verge

Ian Eure (ieure@crosssound.narrows.com)
Mon, 15 Feb 1999 02:09:49 -0800

Keith Duthie wrote:
>
> On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Thomas Pornin wrote:
>
> > In article <Pine.LNX.4.10.9902130147360.17589-100000@loki.wibble.prv> you write:
> > > I believe the problem is that the S3 Virge is VESA 1.2 compliant, but not
> > > VESA 2.0 compliant.
> >
> > It depends on the card model. The chipset (S3 Virge) does not give a
> > damn about Vesa, this is a bios matter. My S3V card is fairly recent
> > (three months old) and includes a Vesa 2.0 bios. My older (1995) S3 Trio
> > 64 V+ does not. But I know one S3 Trio 64 V+ that does include such a
> > bios.
> Perhaps on newer cards, but with older cards with bios versions such as
> the 86C325 I believe I'm probably right. But what I was trying to put
> across is that the VESA framebuffer support requires Vesa 2.0, whereas
> older s3 Virges only support 1.2
>
I think you have misunderstood; VESA (any version) is simply a standard
software API which knows how to talk to whichever graphics chipset it
was programmed for. Back in the DOS days, this was a godsend, since
games etc would only have to support the VESA API instead of writing or
licensing code to directly use the many graphics chipsets available.

It really isn't all that useful anymore, but very helpful in this case.

With that said, most cards >=1995 or so should support VESA 2.0. My
current Diamond Stealth 3D 4000 (S3 ViRGE/DX2, 4mb ram, AGP bus) does,
and (to my surprise) my last card, a generic $20 S3 ViRGE 4mb PCI card
also does.

If your card does not, or only supports VESA 1.2 (Like my trusty Diamond
Viper VLB- Weitek P9000, 2mb ram on a vlb. sweet card for it's time) you
should first talk to the hardware manufacturer and see if they have an
upgrade. next option is to use something like UniVBE for DOS to boot
DOS, install their VESA 2.0 TSR, then use loadlin to boot linux with
VESAFB.

Hopefully, this mess will get straightened out a bit during the 2.3.x
development, and we will get a ViRGEfb driver instead...

Wasn't there a version of UniVBE for Linux announced on Slashdot a while
ago? Has anyone played with it?

-- 
 ______________________________________________________________
| ian eure, network admin, freelance security consultant, and  |
| manically depressed paranoid schizophrenic, at your service. |
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:           raw speed = 105.6 wpm with 4.5% errors             :
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