Having a read on the xgi 2D developer guide makes me wonder if there is such a thing for the ati cards? (as i have an ati card an not an xgi card) And if so is that publicly available?

As a side project i managed to use the provided boot code from this site to start a piece of code written with free pascal. So the next step for that project would be creating a graphical screen from that, as for now it just is text mode only.

The first step for you would be to use the Open Firmware framebuffer.

On Efika you can
Reboot and the system will have a linear framebuffer at that resolution configured and ready for use. The display node (/pci/display) will contain the start address for the buffer and the size.

If you want to *change* the mode and do some other crazy tasks, the x86 emulator allows us to expose some VESA emulation -
You can use the 'help' command to get hints on how to use them
Note these are TOTALLY non-standard words and may go away in future firmware versions, but for now they are quite relevant.

You can simply use the CPU (albeit slowly) to handle graphics drawing to the framebuffer once you have set it up. If you use the VESA functions they *may not* update the display property and the console will disappear, so once you start, don't trust the information about it (it's only good for client interfaces, basically, don't mess with it on the command line unless you use serial lines for io/input-device/output-device or don't mind that the console has been covered over with a new screenmode)

As for ATI documentation, I have it on good authority that this is as close as you get:

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/Radeon%25Architecture

Want any real documentation and you have to talk to my counterpart Developer Relations at ATI to get the NDAs signed and sealed, and have a good reason to do it.

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Matt Sealey

Using the fb-mode i was able to do some putpixel. Thanks.

But why does it need to be set with setenv? Or is there also a setfbmode comand somewhere?

Because you can only set the display node up once, and once you have initialised the display console, you cannot make too many changes to it without throwing away a lot of global environment and reinitialising it.

It's a limitation of the firmware as currently implemented.

There is plenty of room for reworking it, and it *is* possible, but don't hold your breath.

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Matt Sealey

How can i set it back to default settings?

"printenv" will tell you what the default setting is. It is "0x0x0" so setenv fb-mode 0x0x0 will work.

In reality it will discard any broken mode string and anything which does not match a valid VESA mode, so.. just set what you like to get back to text console.

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Matt Sealey