[rescue] rescue Digest, Vol 163, Issue 26 - Re: Raster flex SBus card anyone?

[Gary Sloane]

I didn't see your pic; but perhaps it was a double slot SBus card (the HR)? To
the best of my knowledge there were only SBus versions, although I seem to
remember working with a 9u VME RasterFlex board for the Sun at Vigra (hi
Tim!!!).

There were several rasterflex boards for early Suns:

 was a video capture (SBus) card,don't know much about it

The RasterFLEX-32 is a SINGLE slot SBus card (dimensions 3.3" x 5.776")

and offers a choice of video formats: 1152x900 or 1024x1024.


The RasterFLEX-HR (High Resolution) is a DOUBLE slot SBus card (dimensions
6.7" x 5.776") supporting 1280x1024 video resolution.(Basically the HR is the
32  with a larger frame buffer to support higher resolutions).
The RasterFLEX-24 is not quite so good: it does not support
 such a wide range
of display resolutions, nor such a wide range of 
systems (not always
compatible with 25MHz SBus), does *not* do 
simultaneous *non-destructive*
8-bit and 24-bit colour, and the very 
early ones were double-width SBus cards
(take two slots and dont even 
fit in the Ultra-1 at all).
You might try looking at the OpenBSD "rfx" driver if you cannot find a Sun
one: start with :

http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man4/sparc/rfx.4

The OpenBSD driver supports all 3 rasterflex boards, and the man page includes
board jumper settings. Source code is available, should be relatively
straightforward to port it to SunOS/Solaris...

Also:

VISICOM FINALIZES RASTERFLEX PRODUCT ACQUISITION FROM CONNECTWARE AND
ANNOUNCES RASTERFLEX FOR SOLARIS 2.6
San Diego, CAFebruary 23, 1998
VisiCom
 announced today that it has finalized the purchase of Connectware
Inc. 
RasterFlex Sbus graphics accelerator boards for Sun SPARC and Sun
compatible workstations. VisiCom now has exclusive rights to 
manufacture,
market, sell and support the RasterFlex-32 and 
RasterFlex-HR products, which
are used extensively in systems operating 
in domestic and international
financial institutions.