SUCCESS: x2vga + 480p + xboxfb

[Terra]

Ok, I will not call it a _complete_ success, as there is a very small thin vertical line of waviness on the right edge of the screen. This is where I need some help in fine tuning this.

It is now down to half an 'X'.

What I will say is that I am darn close, and still using the new xboxfb, instead of the previous hack of using vesafb.

Please ensure that you are coming up in 640x480x32 mode, I have not tested it with 800x600x32. For reference, I used the xromwell 640x480.xbe, that ShaLLaX provides, to fire up GentooX. In your 'linuxboot.cfg', use the following:
video=xbox:640x480,nohwcursor,hoc=X,voc=Y

This way our environment will pretty much match up video wise.

What follows is pretty much a brute force method of pushing in a known valid set of Conexant registers.

For reference, the following URLs will show the following:
1) Using detroits vesafb method in GentooX-2.1
http://www.virginvinyl.net/xbox/xbv_vesafb.dump
2) Dump taken from stock GentooX-3.0
http://www.virginvinyl.net/xbox/xbv_xboxfb.dump

I wrote a small script to walk through the register values from #1 above, and set them via 'xbv'.

The script can be downloaded from:
http://www.virginvinyl.net/xbox/x2vga_mode-1.2.sh

If you are using a x2vga box, please test out the script above.

Most importantly, I can use a lot of help weeding out which registers do not need to be set - and also which register is not set properly that is creating that small amount of waviness as mentioned above.

Also within the script, you will find:
1) where I push out 2 more register values again, because something set later perturbed them.
2) where I had removed registers: 0x60 - 0x6E, if you try to set these, a very strange phenomenon will happen where one of the values set will be duplicated to all registers. Most often it is value 0x00, though I have seen it being 0x6E.

I would also recommend leaving the 'xbv' setting chunked to 10 each. There is also strange behavior that if you set to many, or set individual ones in the 0xA0 - 0xAE range, you will pretty much trigger a reboot. Same goes for 0xF0 - 0xFE

As it stands now, I need a Conexant expert/hacker to look at this and see what fine tuning is needed.

~
Terra
~

<EDIT: assigned a version 1.2 moniker to the program>

[Terra]

Progess has been made as I have just finished dialing in the horizontal timing. The right edge sawtooth shearing has been completely eliminated.

I have uploaded version 1.3 of my x2vga_mode.sh script.
http://www.virginvinyl.net/xbox/x2vga_mode-1.3.sh

After running the script, you may have to press the 'auto sync' button on your monitor to recalibrate to the new video timings. YMMV.

The next item on my list is to prevent XFCE4 from resetting the video on me. KDE in GentooX-2.1 did not do this, but I'm finding that XFCE4 in both GentooX-2.1 and 3.0 stomp on the video and kicks it back to 480i.

Any help in this area would be greatly appreciated in ascertaining the difference between starting up KDE and XFCE4, and where the video is getting reset.

~
Terra
~

[jungec]

Nice *explitive* *deleted* work. this is pimp. did you get 800x600 to work or anything higher?

[Terra]

Getting 800x600 to work will come later.

Right now the primary focus is working out the details and logistics for including support into both Cromwell and the Linux Kernel.

I've been in contact with Lehner Franz (Cromwell BIOS) and Oliver Schwartz (Conexant drivers). Neoya has also graciously offered to send Oliver an x2vga adapter so that native xbox-linux support becomes a reality.

At this point, my work has become proof of concept, by showing that x2vga support in the xbox-linux project is a good thing. Now those results will be taken by the respective official maintainers and polished up.

From here, patience is paramount in allowing the maintainers to think about the task at hand and perform a well designed implementation. As a side effect of the implementation, 800x600 mode should be a reality since the key to all of this is properly setting the Conexant chip to HDTV modes. From current indications, there should be official support for the x2vga adapter sometime in February of 2004, until then my temporary solution should bridge the x2vga gap.

~
Terra
~

[detroit]

terra, as far as the video resetting by your windows manager.... did you comment out all the references to xbv in your /etc files? I just did
a:

cd /etc
grep -ir xbv *

to locate any references, then I edited the files and commented these.

** you may also want to check through your home directory for the settings files that begin with .x -- as these can affect windows mgr setttings.

[slick]

Will this script work for someone who cant see crap?! cause I cant see anything when i installed..
i only get console when i ssh in. ive got no luck at all of seeing anything on the tv screen it is so bluured/garbled/fuzzy..... Yuk.
solutions welcome!
thanks
Slick

[kadrim]

might this work for people with the pixel8-vga too?