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ReactOS VGA Driver

Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 12:09 pm
by aicommander
When will the new VGA driver be ready?

Days :D ?
Weeks :) ?
Months :( ?
Years :evil: ?

Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 7:11 pm
by GreatLord
none is working on a new vga drv, or even try fixing the old one

Posted: Mon Jul 30, 2007 8:56 pm
by aicommander
i heard from Colin that someone is implementing one.
Thanks for the information about the broken VGA driver.

I posted it in the #reactos Channel today and as far as I know, someone is implementing a new VGA driver based on our working VBE driver now.

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 12:13 pm
by forart
SuperVGA+ Project
It's abandoned, but i think we can involve some of them...

Posted: Thu Aug 02, 2007 11:46 pm
by aicommander
I really think that someone should work on a new one if no one is now. Just take a look at a few pages of the support forum. Lots of people complaining about a blank black screen and saying that 0.3.0 worked fine (VGA was working).
Examples of issues with VGA (maybe)

http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4023
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4158
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3671
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3852
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3686
http://www.reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3595

Lots of people aren't happy. This needs to be fixed soon.
We don't want people to think that we are moving in the wrong direction.

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 3:55 am
by oiaohm
Sorry to say Fixing the VGA driver is not critical. Having thrid party drivers work and kernel stability are more important. Ie if OS will not run without crashing in qemu and vmware. Running on real hardware is going to be a uphill fight.

And most of those errors had nothing to do with the VGA driver. Yes it was another bug effecting 0.3.1. That will be fixed in 0.3.3(it is fixed now in the rc). It was a complete OS crash out completely. Please try 0.3.3rc you will see there is a big difference in stability.

Note VGA was not really altered between 0.3.0 and 0.3.1. There will be a better VGA driver in time with more monitor and video card support.

Reactos is alpha and really really picky on what hardware it will run on. All kinds of things can cause Reactos to spit the big one at moment. Network cards sound cards..... Let just say any hardware it does not identify correctly can cause big problems. Just because a screen goes black does not mean that the driver controlling the screen had anything to do with it.

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 4:00 am
by aicommander
Most cards are at least vbe 1.2 compatible so why don't we use the same method that we use with the live cd: First try VBE 2.0 and then VBE 1.2 then VGA for graphics.

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 6:55 am
by Reacter
VGA works on my I386 Tandy display, that is (probably) so out on the edge, if it works, ROS should work on lots (I didn't say all) of displays.

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 6:57 am
by aicommander
Not mine. I'm stuck with using an emulator. :(

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:10 am
by Reacter
Your hardware is not 15+ years old... With a 1k modem... . Well, some cards work, some fail, some miserably.

Posted: Fri Aug 03, 2007 7:12 am
by aicommander
I know what you mean. :wink: