epia800 direct vga working

[Steve Gehlbach]

SONE Takeshi wrote:

> Both HAVE_FRAMEBUFFER and VIDEO_CONSOLE set 0xB0 to register 0xFB
> in a default config (SMA_SIZE==8).
> 
> With only this setting, if I run the factory VGABIOS, it does all
> the rest of configuation to VGA (and TV encoder also), and
> I can use epiafb, or even X, with TV-out, flawlessly.
> 
> I don't touch GA registers, neither do VGABIOS.
> 
> So I think the missing bit is in the VGA registers.

Hmmm... well if it is not the GA setup, then this could be more difficult.

I see that the epiafb is not a binary from via, as I was assuming, but 
open source. So at least we can look at the code and see what they are 
doing.  There are quite a number of extended function vga registers in 
the epia, however, so it is hard to know which ones are important.

Probably the way to proceed on this is to take a snap of the vga 
extended registers with Award, then boot with linuxbios and set some 
registers to match Award that look promising, and each time try 
insmod'ing the driver until it works.  This takes some simple C code to 
set and read the various vga registers, which I have, so I will try this 
when I get a chance.

-Steve