A customer
asked me if he’ll ever gets a chance to watch HD movies on an emulated SPARC
machine. At first, I was going to say never ever, but then I looked at the
specs of some ancient adapters and got surprised. The SGI machines were commonly known for good
graphics, but it never occurred to me that Sun machines were really powerful as
well.
The
cgfourteen (cg14) adapter could show Full-HD (1920x1080) pictures back in 1993!
Since the
manufacturers sometimes claim just the theoretic abilities of the chipset, I
wanted to check that the software has been really aware of such graphic modes
in early nineties.
So, I gave
a spin to the old cgfourteen patch from Bob Breuer. And here we go.
 |
| SPARCstation 20 OBP supports 1920x1080 |
Overall the
cgfourteen adapter was really powerful. Michael Lorenz who added the hardware
acceleration support for cgfourteen to NetBSD, wrote “SX has plenty of
registers (128 - eight of them have special functions, the rest is free for
all) and every instruction takes a count to operate on several subsequent
registers or memory locations (ALU ops can use up to 16, memory accesses up to
32). SX supports some parallelism too - the ALUs can do up to two 16bit
multiplications and two other arithmetic or logical ops per clock cycle (32bit
multiplications use both ALUs).
The bad
news is that Bob’s patch doesn’t implement the SX rendering engine. Also, the
Solaris (or rather OpenWindows) driver is very much bound to sun4m SRMMU, so it
won’t work on sun4u machines.
Would
really like to have the emulation of a graphic card which would be better than
cgthree, and ideally would work on both sun4m and sun4u machines, but it’s not
easy.
Right now,
I’m choosing between cgsix and creator ffb, but none of them has public
documentation.
P.S. A
funny fact about the Solaris SX driver: there are lots of symbols which have
the word “SPAM” in a name. It can spamify and unspamify. It’s really hard to google what it could mean
back in nineties. “M” is probably for “Memory”.
