vga(4) - NetBSD Manual Pages

VGA(4)                    NetBSD Programmer's Manual                    VGA(4)


NAME

     vga - VGA graphics driver for wscons


SYNOPSIS

     vga0 at isa?
     vga* at pci?
     wsdisplay* at vga? console ?


DESCRIPTION

     This driver handles VGA graphics hardware within the wscons(4) console
     framework. It doesn't provide direct device driver entry points but makes
     its functions available via the internal wsdisplay(4) interface.

     The vga driver supports multiple virtual screens on one physical display.
     The screens allocated on one display can be of different ``types'', where
     a type refers to various display properties. The type is determined at
     the time the virtual screen is created and can't be changed later.
     Screens are either created at kernel startup (then the default type is
     used) or later with help of the wsconscfg(8) utility.

     Currently, the following screen types are supported:

     80x25   This is the standard VGA text mode with 80 columns and 25 rows.
             16 different colors can be displayed at the same time. Characters
             are 8 x 16 pixels large, and a font consists of 256 characters. A
             builtin font of this size is always present on a VGA card. It's
             also possible to use a downloaded font instead.

     80x25bf is a modified version of the previous. It only allows 8 colors to
             be displayed. In exchange, it can access two fonts at the same
             time, so that 512 different characters can be displayed.

     80x40   A text mode with 80 columns and 40 rows. Similar to the standard
             mode, 16 colors and 256 characters are available.  Characters are
             8 x 10 pixels large. For this mode to be useful, a font of that
             character size must be downloaded.

     80x40bf is analogously to ``80x25bf'' a version with 512 displayable
             characters but 8 colors only.

     80x50   A text mode with 80 columns and 50 rows. Similar to the standard
             mode, 16 colors and 256 characters are available.  Characters are
             8 x 8 pixels large. For this mode to be useful, a font of that
             character size must be downloaded.

     80x50bf is analogously to ``80x25bf'' a version with 512 displayable
             characters but 8 colors only.

     80x24   is a variant of the ``80x25'' screen type which displays 24 lines
             only. It uses the standard 8x16 VGA font.  This mode might be
             useful for applications which depend on closer DEC VT100 compati-
             bility.

     80x24bf Analogously, like ``80x24'' but with 512 character slots and 8
             colors.

     The vga driver can display fonts of the original IBM type and ISO-8859-1
     encoded fonts. As an experimental feature, the ``higher half'' fonts of
     the former NetBSD/i386 pcvt driver distribution can be used too if the
     kernel option ``WSCONS_SUPPORT_PCVTFONTS'' was set at compile time. This
     is only useful with the ``*bf'' screen types; a font containing the ASCII
     range of characters must be available too on this screen.


SEE ALSO

     isa(4), pcdisplay(4), pci(4), wscons(4), wsconscfg(8), wsfontload(8)


BUGS

     Only a subset of the possible text modes is supported.

     VGA cards are supposed to emulate an MDA if a monochrome display is con-
     nected. In this case, the device will naturally not support colors at
     all, but offer the capability to display underlined characters instead.
     The ``80x25bf'', ``80x40bf'', ``80x50bf'' and ``80x24bf'' screen types
     will not be available. This mode of operation is not tested.

NetBSD 1.6                      March 20, 1999                               2