Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 23rd Apr 2009 08:15 UTC, submitted by theosib
You may recall the recent OSNews article about Linux Fund getting donations to supply developers with OGD1 boards. (OGD1 is a what you might call an "open source graphics card," with all designs, documentation and source code available under Free Software licenses. Technically, however, OGD1 is an FPGA-based prototyping platform with memory and video encoders on it. See the wikipedia article.) Since then, the FSF got involved and is asking for volunteers to help with the OGP wiki. The OGP had shown OGD1 driving a graphics display back in 2007 at OSCON. And now, the OGP has just announced technical success with the rather difficult challenge of emulating legacy VGA text mode. They even put up a video on YouTube of a display, driven by OGD1, showing a PC booting into Gentoo.
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Member since:
2006-02-15
There is something I really do not understand. If they build a graphic chip with an FPGA. Why do they need to emulate VGA? Doesnt the chip produce VGA by itself?
No, the chip on the OGD1 is a general purpose CPU. You can program it to do anything you wish, even run a freaking web server if you wish. It just happens to be also capable of doing graphical output, but it has to be programmed to do that first. This would be easy if they could just implement their own calls for setting video mode and all such and implement their own driver for it. But VGA emulation is a completely different beast; you are emulating a whole different card.