MediaGX Fun ----------- This tries to document the "gotcha's" associated with the Cyrix hardware and also the SoftVGA (SMM BIOS emulation of video) implementation. o Palette Handling In theory 8bit modes can use the VGA colour control. In practice this doesn't work at least on some 5530 based systems with LCD displays. Some 5510 based systems need special handling for external LCD RAMDAC. We don't currently do this. o Mode Switches If you load unsuitable data into the Soft VGA mode switching registers or forgot to set the ModeSwitch disable before you load the registers up mode switches may fail. In a few cases you get bogus illegal instructions reported o BIOS Versions The VSA1/VSA2 firmware that does all the magic on the Cyrix processors is an SMM mode software block in the BIOS. This means the Cyrix is one system where different BIOSes have different bugs instead of just having to fight the hardware The BIOS is just plain unusable in a few systems. Code exists to do some mode switches the hard way without VSA getting involved. o Compression Buffer To cut down on the memory usage the display scan checks dirty bits on each scan line (per frame in some situations) and if the line is dirty it scans it from the original buffer and writes back a compressed line if it can do so. If it does this it clears the dirty bit. We have to handle dirty bits ourselves and getting it wrong produces interesting visuals. o Memory Layout When you use VSA to do mode set up it makes certain assumptions about memory layout. Typically it lays out the frame buffer with the compression buffer at the end. When there is enough space between the lines (the chip only handles 1024/2048 bytes stride) it will hide them in the gaps To Do ----- - Add bare-metal setup option for the BIOS afflicted - Add 5510 external ics5432 RAMDAC support - Restore hardware cursor support - DDC/EDID and friends - RandR would be nice for the tablet pc systems