Alliance ProMotion® AT24, AT25/AT3D graphics driver for BeOS Intel/R3.x

Overview


I bought a copy of the BeOS for Intel as soon as it came out. Since the BeOS did not have driver support for the Hercules Stingray 128/3D I thought it would be a challenge to develop such a driver. The main goal was to demystify the inner workings of the graphics card.

 

Disclaimer


This software is installed and used at your own risk. I take no responsibility for any kind of problems with your hardware or software you might have after installing the APM driver.

This software is not supported by Be Inc. nor by Alliance Semicoductors Inc. Please do NOT contact them about this display driver.

 

Technical Specification


This driver currently supports the following Alliance ProMotion® chipsets:

Tested graphic card(s):

Tested monitor(s):

If you have a graphics card with a supported chipset that does not work please contact me. This version of the driver supports:

IMPORTANT NOTE: This driver does NOT support the 3DFX part of the Hercules Stingray 128/3D and it never will so do NOT send me any mail about that. You will NOT get any replay if you do.

Please note that the AT24 chipset support is untested. Please contact me if you use the driver with an AT24 chipset.

 

ToDo


 

Installation


In order to install the driver you must be able to boot up BeOS. I am sorry for this but I do not know any other way to do it. With the BeOS release 3.1/3.2 for Intel you should be able to boot up the machine with the grayscale SVGA driver. If this does not work, the only way I know (and actually the way I did it with BeOS R3.0) is to open your machine and swap your precious APM based graphics card with a supported one (I use an S3 Virge DX).

  1. From your BeOS system, download the Alliance Promotion® driver archive.

    The graphics driver is contained in a zip archive, and can be downloaded from the following location:

    Via HTTP: http://home8.swipnet.se/~w-84936/ApmDriver.zip

    You can of course download the driver from another operating system and transfer it to BeOS using mtools, dosFS or ext2 or what you might prefer.

  2. Decompress the Alliance ProMotion® driver archive.

    Depending on your various preferences, this may happen automatically. If not, just double-click the downloaded archive, and click the Expand button in Expander to decompress the archive.

  3. Move the graphics driver file to the /home/config/add-ons/app_server/ directory of your boot volume.

    The graphics driver file is named APM.

  4. Reboot your BeOS system.

 

Acknowledgements


Thanks to Shawn Cline at Alliance Semiconductors Inc. for providing me with the AT3D specfications.
Thanks to Henrik Harmsen for answering all my questions about the XFree86 AT3D driver.
Thanks to Trey Boudreau of Be Inc. for always answering my questions about the Graphics Driver API.

 

Links


Alliance Semiconductors Inc.
Hercules
XFree86

 

Contact


Do not hesitate to contact me if this interests you.

Send mail to:<matton@mbox301.swipnet.se>
Jonas Matton, BeOS developer: E-13810


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