6500 on-board video: accelerated console?

[Markus Deistler]

Hi,


Stefan Jeglinski wrote:

 > It's been forever since I tried using the 6500's onboard video:
 > ATY,264GT-B (I think it's an Xclaim chip of some sort?). I'm using the

Hi,

Just 2 ideas...I had similar problems to get a ATI-Xclaim in a PPC 7500
working..

Does your monitor support any kind of onscreen-settings menu (I have
never owned an Apple 15" Monitor)?

My monitor usually goes black if the console-video-driver uses a setting
that isn't supported by my monitor. Then my monitor's built-in
onscreen-menu reports "horizontal frequency out of range", so I have a
clue about what is wrong.

Do you use BootX?

I also discovered that sometimes BootX fails to pass on boot-parameters
correctly. I was trying "viedeo=..."-options on end and always ending at
640x480@60MHz, till I looked at dmesg-output and saw
"Kernel command line: root=/dev/sdc4 video=a"  !!!!
It should read something like this:
"Kernel command line: root=/dev/sdc4 video=atyfb:vmode:15,cmode:32"
(I use vmode 15 because 70 HHz is fast enough on a TFT-display)

I guess the kernel isn't able to figure out that "a" means
"video=atyfb:vmode:15,cmode:32"...and uses a "failsafe" VGA-videosetting...

Booting into MacOS and deleting the BootX-Preferences finally helped. I
had to retype and save the boot-parameters at the next start, off course.

Getting XF4.2's ati-driver to work wasn't possible for me (the
fbdev-driver worked, but slow), it was always complaining about unknown
RAMDAC. There is a posting saying that the ati-driver doesn't support
ATI-cards with IBM-RAMDAC, I hope you will not find any IBM-stuff on
your 6500's video ..:-). I use Xpmac and a TrueType-fontserver (xfstt to
replace the XF42's built-in truetype-support) - it does the same job!


Markus