vpix in xterm under X11R4

[James Van Artsdalen]

In <1990Oct26.153940.4742 at pegasus.com>, richard at pegasus.com
	(Richard Foulk) wrote:

> >What about a resolution of 1152x900 in 256 colors on a SuperVGA board ?
> >Yes it's running !!!!

> What brand of board are you using?  1152x900 sounds like a Sun.

News is quite slow to Tom Roell's site, so I'll answer: Tom is using
an ET-4000 based VGA card with 1meg of RAM.

I have a beta copy of his new server that does 1152x900 by 256 colors.
It's quite fast.  There was also support for PVGA1A and ET-3000, and I
hope to add Paradise 90c11 support.

The best way to do X on a SysV based machine is with a hardware
accelerator such as the Dell GPX (a TMS-34010 based card).  You have
to have an X server that runs on your system and supports the desired
hardware, and this costs $$$ (probably well over $2000 when GPX,
monitor, and software are totalled).  But if you're going to work in
an X environment, it's essential to step up from VGA.  The GPX works
at 1024x768 256 color.

For "hobby" work, or light X usage, Tom's port to the ET-4000 looks very
good.  The card out to be in the $300 range with RAM, and the software
is free.  If you go for 1152x900, you'll need a monitor as good as the
GPX, but you could also use a 800x600 monitor (I use NEC 3D) which is
lots cheaper.  I have not seen this on a slow machine yet (less than
25MHz 486 - I have a warped perspective of "slow machine" :-), but in
800x600 256color mode the ET-4000 should work fine for most cases.  The
ET-4000 is very fast: slower video cards may not be so quick.

Warning: it appears that ET-4000 cards may not be fully software
compatible at high resolutions: the method of selecting the clocks
appears to change from card to card.  So Tom's X11r4 server may not
work out of the box on all ET-4000s, but instead need minor changes.

In addition to the GPX, Dell sells 33MHz 486s and 650meg hard disks
for compiling the MIT X distribution with Tom's changes.  :-)
-- 
James R. Van Artsdalen          james at bigtex.cactus.org   "Live Free or Die"
Dell Computer Co    9505 Arboretum Blvd Austin TX 78759         512-338-8789