From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald)
Subject: More ET4000: a bug?
Date: 11 May 92 05:08:49 GMT


I have found that two ET4000 cards (Aamazing and VGA 2theMax) which both work
fine under DELL Unix at work, do not work under Linux at home.  And I am seeing
some funny behaviour on the clock reporting.  The Aamazing has a utility that 
sets modes (dmode) and tells you the Video Clock associated.  It reports a
set of 8 modes.  Cooincedentally, the modes reported by X386 when it starts up
are "exactly half".  Ie:

        Aamazing Utility:  50 56 72 45 60 65 40 47

becomes

        X386:              25 28 36 23 30 32 20 24

And no matter what I do, I always get multiple images (4 usually) on the screen.
Could this be a bug in the X386 server?


PS:  Solved my mouse problem by switching to a different MS mouse.

From: roell@informatik.tu-muenchen.de (The Master of Symbolic Links)
Subject: Re: More ET4000: a bug?
Date: 11 May 92 09:30:41 GMT

>   I have found that two ET4000 cards (Aamazing and VGA 2theMax) which both work
>   fine under DELL Unix at work, do not work under Linux at home.  And I am seeing
>   some funny behaviour on the clock reporting.  The Aamazing has a utility that 
>   sets modes (dmode) and tells you the Video Clock associated.  It reports a
>   set of 8 modes.  Cooincedentally, the modes reported by X386 when it starts up
>   are "exactly half".  Ie:
>
>          Aamazing Utility:  50 56 72 45 60 65 40 47
>
>   becomes
>
>          X386:              25 28 36 23 30 32 20 24
>
>   And no matter what I do, I always get multiple images (4 usually) on the screen.
>   Could this be a bug in the X386 server?

Yeah, this is a known bug in X386 1.2 on the MIT tape. I fixed it for the
driver Dell sells ...

- Thomas
--
===============================================================================
e-mail: roell@informatik.tu-muenchen.de

        immer ?
        nein, nicht immer ...
        ... aber immer oefter !

From: pmacdona@sanjuan (Peter MacDonald)
Subject: Re: More ET4000
Date: 11 May 92 18:36:50 GMT


Thanks to Chin Fang for his tutorial, and his ideas on optimization.
Critique the following please:

Perhaps it would help if we fixed some of the parameters.  After all,
finding the optimum configuration for our Card/Monitor pair is, to
most of us, secondary to getting the damn thing to work at all.  

It seems to me, that most video cards cards can do "640x480" "800x600" 
and "1024x768" and they just assume certain monitor characteristics.
Also, the video cards I have tried also provide a way of finding out 
what the horiz freq and video clock used with these are, either in a 
manual or under DOS utilities.  

Since X386 can detect clocks itself (theoretically), a usable configuration
would just have to supply the monitor max horiz sync freq.

Perhaps the following could work:
===============================================================

Modes "640x480" "800x600" "1024x768"

MaxHorizFreq 35.5

vga256
#Resolution  Clock  H.Freq
 "640x480"   25     35.5  640 672 699 728   800 810 830 850
 "640x480"   28     38    640 ....
 "640x480"   40     40    640 ....
 "800x600"   28     35.5  800 ....
 "800x600"   40     40    800 ....
 ...

===============================================================

Perhaps modes can be extended to specify exact clocks/freq like:

Modes "640x480"-28 "800x600"-40-40 "1024x768"

But the default could be to just assume a fairly log sync freq, like 35.

So, does this sound reasonable?  Or am I coming from somewhere around
the orbit of europa?

pmacdona@tadpole.bcsc.gov.bc.ca