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):
- Hercules Stingray 128/3D (version SS3316, revision 2)
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:
- 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1152x900 and 1280x1024 in 8,16 and 32 bits per pixel modes.
- Hardware acceleration: BitBlts, line drawing and solid rectangular fills.
- Hardware cursor support.
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
- I am having trouble finding information about how to specify the CRTC registers.
I do not know how to correctly specify where the sync and blanking periods should start and stop.
The driver currently uses settings based on VESA and XFree86 modes. If you have any ideas of how
to calculate the CRTC registers for arbitrary screen sizes and refresh rates do not hesitate
to contact me.
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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
This page has been accessed times since 1998-07-05.