Gerald Zajac <zajacg@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 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. There is a key combination (currently F12 + left command + left control + left shift) that would let you fall back to a safe mode, but it's not yet implemented to do anything. > 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. They would only be blacklisted in the boot loader to select a better mode, and there, a driver is not available anyway. > > 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 remember they always used to do that, and this was a common complaint about them :-) But apparently it's only a guide, and the VBE implementations can choose what to use. > > 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. Which best should be configurable via settings file or even better, the Screen preferences app. But a scaled image looks always poor compared to a crisp native resolution one, no matter how good the scaling works. > 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. That would be a viable solution. But before we do this, I want to experiment with the CRTCInfoBlock structure that you can provide mode switches with to set a specific timing. If that doesn't help, I'm open for more generic solutions. I've added the CRTC stuff in r28390, please tell me if that works for you. Bye, Axel.