From: jon@robots.ox.ac.uk (Jon Tombs) Subject: Re: ET4000 and 32K or more colors on X Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 18:14:46 GMT
In article <289bhu$2tc@crcnis1.unl.edu> jepler@herbie.unl.edu (JEFF EPLER) writes:
>Cc: ssotir@theseas.ntua.gr
>
>ssotir@ntua.gr (Stavros Sotirchos) writes:
>
>>I would like to use more than 256 colors in my X session.
>>Is this possible and if yes how?
>>I must mention that I have a MegaEva/2 card with ET4000 and TruaColor DAC.
>
>As far as I know, no support for greater than eight bits color depth
>is supported by Xfree, and will not be in the next release.
Currently xfree86-2.0 is still using the standard vga 6 bits per color 256
color (8 color plane) mode. There was talk of getting 8 bits per color (for
the ramdacs that support it) before 2.0 but I don't think this is so likely
now - but this is slightly of the subject.
>However, I think that sometime in the future this capability will be
>supported. (I saw one comment that said, basically, "Wait for 2.1")
To get > 256 colors on an ISA based card then first we require somebody to
port the MIT newcfb 16 bit framebuffer code to the SVGA banked video model.
This is pretty nasty although quite possible. I would expect that a "wait for
2.2" would probably be more accurate time scale. To do 24 bit would require
writing from scratch the framebuffer code. The MIT newcfb code has support
for 32 bit but not 24 bit packed pixels which is unfortunatly what almost
all SVGA cards use (the expection I know of is the S3-928 cards with the
BookTree ramdac which can do 32 bit truecolor - possibly the ATI mach32 can
aswell).
Jon.