From: Hartmut Niemann <niemann@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de>
  To  : ggi Mailingliste <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 15:44:26 +0100 (MEZ)

Support for VGA modes?

Hi!
Recently the question was brought up again, whether a driver
should support legacy modes.
Some modern cards (IIRC at least the Millennium and the Trio) can
do some VGA modes with only limited functionality (no accelleration).

Is there consensus whether these modes should be supported and 
what price we would be willing to pay?
Would it be reasonable to have e.g. one strictly-MMIO Millennium driver,
which does support multiheading, and a second legacy-support driver 
which uses traditional VGA modes as well?

If we leave this entirely to the driver author's choice,
I see fights coming. 

How much work would you put into supporting some braindead legacy VGA mode in
your driver?
I wouldn't do much for it.

But what would we lose if we supported anything below 640x400x8 only
in the VGA driver, or if it's possible without too much work?

We might finally be forced to fix the unloading ... :-)

Hartmut

(BTW: I am planning a 1024x768 *only* driver for my 8514 clone :-)
--  
Hartmut Niemann   --   niemann(a)cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de
http://cip2.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de:8080/hyplan/niemann/index_en.html [/ggi]