[rescue] A Little More SS5 progress

[Arno Kletzander]

William Barnett-Lewis <wlewisiii at gmail.com> wrote:

> Paid attention to the diagnostics and learned that the video card is a CG3.
> In theory it can drive 1024x768 but my PC monitor doesn't like the @77 of
> that. Definitely need a better video card. Hopefully I can find a S24 for
> cheap.

Hello,

back in around 2008-2010, "der mouse" and I did some tweaking with cgthree (on a SPARCclassic, I think) and cgfourteen framebuffers. From some old mails, I was able to reconstruct that r1024x768x70 and r1024x768x60 resolutions were also supported - you could try and see if the cgthree implementation in the SS5 also does those.

Even if not, it may not be necessary after all to replace the Video Card. This however entails working out the Video Timing for the desired Resolution and frequency, and altering some stuff inside the driver FCode that is normally executed from the framebuffer ROM upon Startup. (This is easily achieved by overloading the corresponding methods and can be automated via the nvramrc facility.) 

The magic is just something like a mode line with a complement of not-immediately-sensemaking numbers. I should still have a spreadsheet around somewhere that helps to calculate the values - it basically goes like "enter desired Resolution/Timing, select a preset Pixel clock frequency which gives nice integer numbers, read out necessary Multipliers". Let me know if you need that and I'll try to find it.

So Long,
Arno