[haiku-development] Re: Boot Screen Not Displayed with Various Video Chips

Axel Dörfler wrote:

Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Also the horizontal frequency seems low for 1280x1024 with a refresh rate of 87 Hz unless the chip is generating an interleaved display. Otherwise the horizontal frequency should be double what it is.
We're using VESA modes only during startup, so the modes shouldn't be that off. Have you tried to switch to different modes with the VESA drivers on these chips?
The VESA driver selects the same mode, and also does not display anything because the monitor indicates the mode is out of range. AFAIK, no key strokes like BeOS has were ever implemented to allow setting a lower resolution.
Anyway, if a resolution of 1024x768 is selected as the fail-safe video mode in the boot menu, the boot screen is displayed on the LCD monitor via all of the these video chips and the refresh rate is 60 Hz in all these cases. Consequently, I think that the resolution of the boot screen should be limited to 1024x768.
I would rather like to find out why it is failing for you before doing such a step. This would especially be of interested of those needing to use the VESA driver. If some chips are known to have a broken modelist, we might want to blacklist them.
All the chips that I have tested that have this problem, are either currently supported by the S3 driver, or will be supported by the ATI driver when I complete it. Thus, there is no need to blacklist them because the VESA driver will not handle them correctly at 1280x1024.
Maybe we just choose the wrong mode option of several, though, as the chips are definitely capable of producing that resolution (and VESA modes should always come out with 60 Hz).
VESA modes do not always produce 60 Hz refresh rate. They usually do with a laptop chip, but this not the case with other video chips. For example, the S3 Savage chips display the boot screen, but the refresh rate is usually 75 Hz.
I don't see the point of using a boot screen with a higher resolution than 1024x768 since the logo and icon start to look quite small at larger resolutions. Zeta used 800x600, and their boot screen looks fine. 

It just looks so much better to use the native resolution.
A 1024x768 boot screen on my 1280x1024 monitor looks very good. Maybe your monitor does a poor job of expanding a screen. Laptops do a particularly poor job of expanding a display image to fill the LCD screen. That is why the latest S3 driver no longer allows a laptop chip to expand a display image to fill the LCD screen.
Another possible solution to this problem would be to limit the boot screen resolution to 1024x768 if the chip is a VESA 2.0 chip. These chips are mostly older chips, and all chips that had this problem IIRC were VESA 2.0 chips. Later chips at VESA 3.0 or later could continue to be handled as they are now. 

Regards,
Gerald

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