RE: XFree under alien systems - the XF86Sup.sys approach and Windows NT

[Mike MacDonald <mmacdonald at tsi dot gte dot com>]

I am starting to recover from my dental surgery.   What a MESS!!  Christmas
may hang me up though.  Whats up with the cygwin-xfree mailing list?  I
haven't seen anything on there..

Making the X server a DOS app would not be a terrible idea.   I've done
direct screen writes in Win 9x from a dos prompt, and I know it can be done
that way in win 9x.  Sounds like NT is similar.  I upgraded my machine to
win2000 though..  I guess the only thing that that effects is Direct X.

If NT command prompt works like Win 9x command prompt, then an xf86sup.sys
driver might not be necessary.  Win 9x let me access video memory directly
from the dos prompt without any argument.  I'm fairly (not 100%) sure that I
wrote to ports like that also..


> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-xfree-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com
> [mailto:cygwin-xfree-owner@sourceware.cygnus.com]On Behalf Of Matt
> Lewandowsky
> Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 1999 8:39 PM
> To: Federico Bianchi; Suhaib Siddiqi
> Cc: XFree86 over CygWin mailing list
> Subject: RE: XFree under alien systems - the XF86Sup.sys approach and
> Windows NT
> 
> 
> Well, AFAIK, only DOS Console apps are allowed to directly access video
> hardware in NT. (And therefore change VESA modes.) I use a DPMS screen
> saver that takes advantage of this "loophole" by running a DOS app that
> essentially does a "mode co40" in full-screen mode and then performing
> the VESA call. I'm not sure how helpful this is, but it's about all I
> know about video in NT. (And still more than I wanted to know...) Just
> out of curiosity, did the mentioned code run in Win 9x?



The mentioned code runs on OS/2 and OS/2 is similar story as WinNT.
i trhink a device driver guru could definitely hack it to work on NT too

Regards
Suhaib

> 
> My $0.02,
> 
> Matt Lewandowsky
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Federico Bianchi [mailto:bianchi@www.arte.unipi.it]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 1999 6:32 AM
> To: Suhaib Siddiqi
> Cc: XFree86 over CygWin mailing list
> Subject: XFree under alien systems - the XF86Sup.sys approach and
> Windows NT
> 
> <SNIP>
> I had a discussion thread with Suhaib a couple of months ago about both
> the XFree86 port to Win32 and the XF86Sup.sys approach chosen for the
> OS/2
> one. I used (and modified) the files he gave me to work with two generic
> drivers available under NT, i.e., PortIO.sys and MapMem.sys (the names
> are
> pretty explainatory: PortIO lets user mode apps perform IN and OUTs to
> devices, while MapMem maps a chunk of physical memory into an app
> virtual
> space), but so far my test applications consistently give BSOD on an NT
> 4.0SP5, S3 equipped machine. I had a similar trouble at the end of 1997
> (I had to access SVGA/VESA under the NT VDM/DPMI subsystem), and I found
> 
> it was due to the optimizations the NT display driver used when
> switching
> modes.
> <SNIP>
>