New Solar OS released 2004_12_25

[six_L]

Mr. BogdanOntanu,
Thanks you for replying.
today, we have to depend on Microsoft to live in the virtual IT world. we sincerely wish you build an another IT world and send Microsoft back home. it's need long road to walk. if a dream to be exist,  someday of accomplishing will always be exist.

regards.

[BogdanOntanu]

It is not my intention to attack or duplicate/clone Microsoft Windows or other OS (like Linux)

I am just doing my own OS the way i like it. I will constantly refuse to orient my OS in the direction "others" want me to.
Either "elite" others or large numbers of "common" users.  However you are free to do with it as you like under the GPL license.

This OS is (if ever) intended only for some types of programmers that want total control over their hardware and are not willing to sacrifice simple things for paranoical security. It can be used for testing and fast prototyping of hardware, for toy and for fun and for serious applications also. But you have to pay the price of knowledge and confidence and it will never be "trendy".

Fortunately my choices will keep my OS from ever becoming much to popular or sucessful  in the world we live in now :))
And i can live ever happyly with this.

[thomasantony]

Hi,
  This is how my Qemu window looks like. That is the SolOs menu screen(resolution selection)

Thomas Antony

[attachment deleted by admin]

[pbrennick]

Thomas,
I think something went wrong with your image.  It is just barely readable to me.
Paul

[BogdanOntanu]

Thomas Antony

I can not open the jpeg inside the zip something is wrong with it
Anyway for screenshots JPEG is the worst choice, PNG is much better
JPEG destroys the image in ways that are incomplatible with regular shapes

Please take care to use the VGA bios that has VESA support in QEMU

[Statix Star]

an important request, sys restore against hacks.

[thomasantony]

Hi Bogdan,
      I finally got it to work in Qemu. It was just that i was too lazy to read its docs. It worked Ok when I set my desktop res to 16-bit high color. But still I wish I could run it on my real system. Then it would be much more faster (Qemu - 41 MHz and My PC:850 MHz!!). Even when running menuet os, I have to use the VGA color mode which is absolutely boring. When I ran it in QEmu the VESA modes looked gr8 but it is still very slow. If my gfx doesn't support VESA, how come I can use 24-bit True Color 1024*768 in Windows?

Thomas Antony

[BogdanOntanu]

Windows will have a driver specific to you video board.

What kind of video board do you have thomas?

Maybe i can make up a driver for your video board; but i need more informations about it.
And i do need to see the screenshots and what info is shown on the text mode SolarOS startup setup screen on your hardware.
If your video board supports VESA 1.2 then we only need a small bank switching routine for it to make all OS work

I guess that ZIP with the screenshot image was compressed with a compresion method that is so new that my old un-zipper knows nothing about it :D. And btw QUEMU has a problem with keyboard scancodes :D

[thomasantony]

Hi,
   Plz see these links

http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/intel810/sb/CS-009140.htm

It is the support page for my Gfx card

and this

ftp://aiedownload.intel.com/df-support/2695/eng/os2r214.zip

That is the developer files for the card
Thomas Antony :U

[BogdanOntanu]

I will check them out,

From what i see the I810 video chip supports only 24bits for truecolor. It is not supporting 32bits.
Also the accelerated functions only work in 8bits or 16bits but NOT in 24bits or 32bits.
I have not found ony references about VESA 2.0 support yet... i will have to see.

AFAIK the 24bits is no problem for SolarOS latest versions neither are 16bits or 8bits.
So it should be working... unless it is not supporting VESA 2.0

I am still checking...

[MichaelW]

Hi Thomas,

Instead of trying to determine if your system supports VESA 2.0 indirectly, why not just "ask" it what it supports. The attachment is a quick and dirty DOS app to do this. It works OK under Windows 2000 so it will probably work OK under any version of Windows, but note that you must run the app full screen.

There is also a VBE function to return detailed information on any of the supported modes. The VBE 3.0 standard is available here (Free Standards and Public Documents):

http://www.vesa.org/standards_free.html


[attachment deleted by admin]

[thomasantony]

Hi,
    I used your prog and got this info.


VbeSignature = 'VESA'

VbeVersion = 0300

OemString = 'Intel(R) 8xx Chipset Video BIOS'

Capabilities:

  DAC width is switchable to 8 bit per primary color
  Controller is VGA compatible
  Normal RAMDAC operation
  No hardware stereoscopic signaling support

Supported VBE display modes:

  0109h, 010Ah, 010Bh, 010Ch, 011Dh, 010Eh, 0100h,
  0128h, 0101h, 0110h, 0111h, 0112h, 0102h, 0103h,
  0114h, 0115h, 0105h, 

TotalMemory = 1024KB

OemSoftwareRev = 2182

OemVendorName = 'Intel Corporation'

OemProductName = 'Intel(R) 8xx Chipset'

OemProductRev = 'Hardware Version 0.0'


Press any normal key to exit...


Hope this helps!! :U
Thomas Antony :U

[BogdanOntanu]

Well under those circumstances it should run in Sol OS i see no reason for it not to run...

Is it returning the same information when the program is started from a plain DOS and not from windows?


Of course it supports 2 unknown custom mode that i do not list :D
And probably higer resolutions are achiveable only by using a specific driver but still from your list you could use:

In 256 colors (pallete black and white in Solar OS)

Code Select Expand


101  =  640x480x256 colors -> Option 0
103  =  800x600x256 colors -> Option 1
105  = 1024x768x256 colors -> Option 2


In 65536 colors "High Color" ; RGB 5:6:5 color format
you can use:

Code Select Expand


111  =  640x480 x 65536 colors -> Option 4
114  =  800x600 x 65536 colors -> Option 5


In 16milions of colors - "True Color" ; RGB x:8:8:8 color format
you can use:

Code Select Expand


112  =  640x480 x True color -> Option 8
115  =  800x600 x True color -> Option 9


Other options are not available for you in solar os for now.
You are missing the 1280x1024 modes and most 1024x768 modes :D

Again, I bet that the higher resolutions modes can only be setup by a specific PCI driver
or by investigating the two unknown (to me) modes: 11Dh and 128H

Other modes reported by your video card using VESA video interface
are either in much to low resolution, 5:5:5 duplicate  or text modes.

[MichaelW]

I made a mistake in my code that caused it to skip some of the supported modes :red I replaced the original attachment with a corrected version.

[thomasantony]

Here is the new out put:


VbeSignature = 'VESA'

VbeVersion = 0300

OemString = 'Intel(R) 8xx Chipset Video BIOS'

Capabilities:

  DAC width is switchable to 8 bit per primary color
  Controller is VGA compatible
  Normal RAMDAC operation
  No hardware stereoscopic signaling support

Supported VBE display modes:

  0109h, 010Ah, 010Bh, 010Ch, 011Dh, 010Eh, 0100h, 0127h,
  0128h, 0101h, 0110h, 0111h, 0112h, 0102h, 0103h, 0113h,
  0114h, 0115h, 0105h, 

TotalMemory = 1024KB

OemSoftwareRev = 2182

OemVendorName = 'Intel Corporation'

OemProductName = 'Intel(R) 8xx Chipset'

OemProductRev = 'Hardware Version 0.0'


Press any normal key to exit...

BTW, when I selected the options you said abt, it says something like LFB at blah:blah and RGB:something else. But when I press enter, it says that Mode unavailable and displays menu again!! what's wrong?
Thomas Antony :U