[OFF TOPIC?] Fixed Freq Monitor Questions

BTW: no one responded to this message, so I guess no one knew the answer. I received a responce to a USENET post about this and thought there might be some interest in the group. The VGA spec supports 'doublescan' mode for low resolution compatability with CGA apps. This essentially forces the card to draw each horizontal line twice, thus doubling the refresh rate (or your vertical resolution in half at the same refresh rate) at any arbitrary horizontal scan rate. Well, some chipsets (like the 968, Matrox Millenium, and most ATI chipsets), allow for tripplescanning which does exactly what one would expect... it scans each horizontal line three times before skipping down to the next line, thus allowing one to drop down to a third of the vertical resolution at the same refresh rate (same horizontal rate always, of course). OK. XFree86 and SVGAlib don't support tripplescan mode, but they do support doublescan mode because it's part of the VGA spec. Tripplescan is vendor specific, and so thus is enabled in different ways for each chipset. I'm attempting to hack svgalib to support tripplescan for the S3/968... waiting for the 968 docs to arrive so I can find the register and register values to set for my adapter. The rest seems fairly easy, just hack in parsing for 'tripplescan' on the modeline and such. Why does this matter to you? Well, if you have an Hitachi HM-4119, HP1097C, or somesuch fixed freq monitor, getting it to work under Linux is pretty easy once you know the trick. Why buy a $1500 monitor when you've got a perfectly fine one sitting on your VaxStation 3100? Well, for the purposes of this list, why not just use the 3100 as the xterm... but that defeats the purpose of this message. ;-) --jmg [bit 'o original] ------------------- OK, This is mildly on topic. My monitor is an HP 1097C, making it at least 10 years old. However, I am using it with a modern PC, so that's where the 'on topic' issue gets a little iffy. I'm sure there are plenty of people here who can answer this question. A pointer to a FAQ would be most welcome.