Re: Graphic options for DS10L


"Michael Moroney" <moroney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:eh6dbk$3fg$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Paul Sture <paul.sture.nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

In console mode, it uses a very basic driver. You don't get the full
1280*1024 or whatever you choose until Motif fires up.

I noticed that on booting, something happens such that the font changes
although it's still in VGA text mode. What happens here? This is before
the change into Decwindows.


When the graphics driver loads it takes over the VGA. You will notice that
it gets faster - my code is somewhat more sophisticated. Since we do not
run the BIOS init code to go into/out of VGA mode - we load our own font.
VGA mode consists of the VGA register settings, and two memory space frame
buffer addresses - one is where the text and attributes are written - and
one is where the font glyphs are loaded.

The "OpenVMS Operator Console" line on the 25th line is the clue that we
have taken over.

In console mode, the screen speed is also somewhat slow; you want to
avoid full screen edits for example.


VGA text mode once VMS take over is not really too bad. Full screen edits
are not painful.

You want slow? Try the console on an Alphastation 200 with a ZLXP-Ex
TGA card. Scrolling a full screen one line literally takes seconds.
It apparently does so at high IPL since this messes up the system clock,
too.


The original TGA chip did not have a VGA cell. Console text output is done
by dumb frame buffer writes of each glyph. Scrolling is done by copying
scanlines up.

This doesn't involve VGA text mode. The number of lines is larger,
and the text is white on black. Probably fully emulated in the console
code.

Again, once VMS takes over - it is "somewhat" faster but still fairly slow.
It also IIRC reduces the number of lines to a very small number.

The original Vaxstation 1 console was 6 lines on a monochrome FB.



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