> Okie, first off im using FreeBSD, and i have a tnt2 in my computer, so, i
> was thinking about trying to play with direct access to the video card,
> back in the dos days all we had to do is throw out a couple lines of
> assembly and start writting to 0xa0000000 but i imagine its a little more
> involved than that for unix, or is it ? i havnt been able to find any
> documentation on anything to do with talking directly to the video card,
> but im sure its out there, anyone have any links ? anyone know how to
> start talking to the video card ? Thanks in advance !
Actually, it's a lot different from DOS! The main difference is that
72is a single user, single tasking system while UN*X is a multi-user,
multi-tasking system. So, you always have to assume, that there isn't
just one process that's drawing to the screen but many and there has to
be some controlling instance, that gets asked by the different programs
to draw something and decides when and where this is done. So, no simple
program should be able to access the graphics hardware (or any hardware
at all) directly but only via requesting a service from the controlling
instance. Often, this controlling instance is the kernel (or a module
that gets loaded into the kernel). For grapics, it's the X server
probably running on your machine.
Of course, you can start hacking X or not use X at all and do everything
using your own routines (which must probably ask the kernel nicely to
allow it ;-) But that may not be what you want do, so the short answer
to your question probably is, you can't simply access your graphics card
as you did in DOS.
Jens
--
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_ | | | | | | AG Moebius, Institut fuer Molekuelphysik
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