FreeLists / haiku-development / [haiku-development] Re: S3 Video Driver

[Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Siarzhuk,

Siarzhuk Zharski wrote:
> > This driver has been tested with actual hardware for all these chips 
> > except for the Trio64 UV+ and the Virge MX, and has been found to 
> > work reliably.  Note that the plain Trio64 and the Trio64V+ are not 
> > supported by this driver.
> Are there any serious technical reasons do not do this? I'm asking 
> this, because Microsoft Virtual PC emulate following one as it's 
> graphics hardware:
> 8811    86C732 Trio32, 86C764 Trio64, 86C765 Trio64V+ Rev 01
The plain Trio64 86C764 is not supported because it does not support 
Memory Mapped I/O (MMIO).  If someone has any ideas about how to handle, 
under BeOS/Haiku, a video chip that supports only PIO, I might consider 
supporting that chip.  The Trio64V+ 86C765 does appear to support MMIO, 
and works fine using 16 bit color;  however, I was unable to get it to 
work using 8 bit indexed colors which might mean that it does not fully 
support MMIO.  It always ignored whatever 8 bits colors that I had set;  
thus, I decided to not support it.  Since video cards with this chip 
have only 1 or 2 MB of memory, a user would be limited to some rather 
low resolutions if only 16 bit color is supported.  For example, if a 
card has only 1 MB of memory, the maximum resolution would be 800 x 600 
using 16 bit color.  The age of these chips was another reason for not 
supporting them;  that is, very few potential users will have computers 
with these video chips.
As for the status of the S3 video driver, the Savage driver code has 
been fully merged into this driver;  and is working fine except for some 
problems that had existed in the Savage driver regarding some chips that 
had not  been tested when the Savage driver was submitted last year.  
These problems which I'm working on are:
1)  Savage 3D chip did not work with 16 bit color, and when I got that 
working, it would freeze the system when moving a window which had a 
large number of bitmaps such as the game BShisen.
2)  Savage/MX-MV  works fine under BeOS  as long as the user starts up 
with the default 640x480 boot screen;  however, if a higher resolution 
boot screen is used, it will only work at the resolution of the boot screen.
3)  Savage 2000 does not draw properly.

When these problems are resolved and more testing is performed, I will 
submit the source code to the project.
Best regards,
Gerald