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From: Nuno J. Silva on 17 Jul 2010 11:18
While trying to achieve higher resolutions on a system with a S3
Virge/DX PCI, I tried a Cirrus Logic Alpine (PCI, too).

(Maybe I'd never be able to achieve a resolution as big as the highest
achievable with the S3, but I dunno how to avoid the annoying horizontal
jitter which, despite also appearing below 1280x1024 gets really
annoying at that resolution.)

Before dealing with Xorg, I tried to get a reasonable framebuffer:
vbeprobe (at GNU GRUB) shows nothing, and the card probably doesn't
support VESA 2.0 (the version supported by vesafb from Linux).

cirrusfb (the kernel framebuffer driver) is actually able to set the
resolution - although the computer freezes with a "ghost image" from the
last shown screen, the ghost image is resized according to the desired
resolution (and is repeated on the right if the framebuffer is too
wide).

Although the card works in Xorg, it is unable to perform higher than
1024x768 at a depth of 8 bits - that's expected, as it is detected as
having 1 MiB of video RAM and

1024 * 768 * 1 byte = 768 KiB

while 1280x1024 would require 1280 KiB at the same depth (lower depths
didn't work), clearly more than the available VRAM.

The card actually has two free expansion slots to add more 512 KiB (I
presume) of video RAM. Filling them will probably allow higher
resolutions.

I got no spares, but the slots are exactly like the ones in my S3 Virge
card, brown 2*20 pin slots for memory chips. Although this is not my
card, the slots look like the same:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:S3_virge_gx.jpg

But in the S3 I got "VT514264-35 9831" modules, while the Cirrus has
"OKI Japan M514260B-70J 54354099A9Z". Unless there's something
critically different like allowed memory refresh rates, or even
different electronic specifications, I suppose I can use chips from the
S3 Virge in the Cirrus card.

Anyone has hints on the probability of compatibility between these
chips?

And I wonder how do I take one of those chips off the slot - is some
sort of special tool needed?

--
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
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