LCD & QNX 6, VGATV howto

QNX DEVELOPERS Realtime and Embedded
1

I’m trying to get graphical video output on my PC104 board with LCD. Under MS-DOS in order to get proper output, I use vgatv utility, which converts VGA output to PAL/NTSC TV format.
How to do the same under QNX?

Another way I know, is to modify video card registers. I know values to set, under MS-DOS it was checked, but how to apply them properly under QNX? I’m afraid, there will be some problems with the native video driver, because, for example, vgatv utility is residental…

So, I’ll be very glad to get any information about this topic.
It’s possible to post any additional information about card and/or LCD, if it helps.

2

The source to the vga driver are available, so if you know what vgatv utility does maybe you can incorporate them in the vga driver.

3

Actually, I don’t want to develope new vga driver. I’m looking for the easiest recipe. For example, how to use given utilities in DDK, which are seemed to be available to switch to various modes using special libraries (like devg-*).
Can anybody tell me if there are useful utilities to be tried out and how to use them?

4

The utilities in the Graphics DDK are for using a driver directly without Photon even existing. In fact photon must not be using that card otherwise there will be a conflict.

The basic way the GUI is implemented is: Photon talks to the graphics resource manager, io-graphics, which in turn has loaded and solely operates the graphics driver for your card. So, the driver is effectively just a library that another program utilises.

With that in mind, you may be able to poke around behind the driver and enable the TV output without the driver needing to know about it. No guarantees though.

The other more friendly approach would be to add the feature to the existing driver. Some sources are open for tweeking but for others you will need to talk to QSS.

5

QSS wants 1000$ for source codes of devg-stpc. It’s very nice, isn’t it?

So, I’ve decided to try to solve this problem by myself, with the help of native video controller documentation. Can anybody tell me, how long it will take me to develope my own driver or modeswitcher? (how long did it take you…?)

The first question I got is how to realize int10 call?

The second - how to realize such asm construction as:
mov ax, 3c1h
out …
mov myvar, dx

I mean, how to deal with dx register? After I call internal function, it’ll put result in dx, so how can I get it?