OSDev.org

Hi,

I've been searching all over for information about VBE/AF support but I can't find almost anything about it. I just wanted to know if it is supported by most cards like VBE 2.0, just a few like VBE 3.0 or none at all. It would be nice to have some kind of hardware acceleration. Brendan wrote something somewhere saying that nobody ever implemented it but I'm not sure if he meant in software or hardware. Basically I'm just wondering what's up with VBE/AF and if it is worth implementing or not.


Cheers,

Luís

Hi,

Luis wrote:I've been searching all over for information about VBE/AF support but I can't find almost anything about it. I just wanted to know if it is supported by most cards like VBE 2.0, just a few like VBE 3.0 or none at all. It would be nice to have some kind of hardware acceleration. Brendan wrote something somewhere saying that nobody ever implemented it but I'm not sure if he meant in software or hardware. Basically I'm just wondering what's up with VBE/AF and if it is worth implementing or not.

As far as I know, VBE/AF hasn't been implemented in any video card's firmware; but has been implemented in software (e.g. as a driver for DOS). However, the software implementations only really existed for old video cards (where it's just as easy to get actual programming info and write native drivers anyway).


Cheers,

Brendan

VBE/AF is sufficiently nonexistent that it's not worth your time.

Your best bet is to take a first generation 3D card, read VGADOC and the mesa source code and reverse engineer your own implementation based on that.

Thanks, guys. For now I'll write a CPU vectorized driver and I'll reverse engineer other implementations when I have some more spare time. Probably I should also consider writing the driver OpenGL 2D compliant so I can easily have acceleration support to draw OS GUI when later implementing the real hardware drivers, what do you think?