First of all, thanks so much for the work and the thread! Truly Epic!
I have read 90 percent and only understood 20 percent, but I have made it here.
I am going to be testing on my cab this weekend and will give my specs and results.
Macro specs are D9800 with a AVGA HD2400 with a 2.53 Dual-Core and also an onboard video to complicate things. I thought I would jump in because I haven't seen many or any mention of the HD2400 AVGA card on this thread. I hope to have a good experience but also help out with my experience if issues arise.
Definitely will be good to test the next ISO image, I'm getting the whole grub setup more bullet proof and also have a fix in the kernel hopefully for the older Radeon cards which the last kernel update broke for a few games modelines.
My intention is to have a dual boot with both partitions setup to use. Not necessary but thought I would give it a go.
One question to help me start out because this thread has pretty much the kitchen sink.
The HD2400 AVGA card came right before the 3000 but was intended for the d9200 which only supported up to 31KHZ I think. The d9800, as you know, goes to 38KHz. I have been trying to achieve 800x600 60Hz but the AVGA HD2400 is only able to do 800x600 FH 32.8KHZ FV 52.3HZ which is spec.
Does any of your modelines in Linux or windows support 800X600 FH 37.8KHZ FV 60.2HZ? This would not be for games but a nice full desktop experience.
Great to have another AVGA card being tested, should be interesting
. It really should be easy to generate a modeline for that resolution with switchres, for a desktop will definitely require a customized one since we do a 648x480 for the desktop by default (progressive for the d9800, interlaced for arcade monitors).
Oddly If I run switchres like this, I get a modeline that probably will be good for your card...
mcp SwitchResC # ./switchres --calc 800 600 52.3 --monitor d9800 -v -v
# [5] 800x600@52.30 34.0473Khz
"800x600x52.30" 34.319678 800 832 936 1008 600 614 618 651 -HSync -VSync
Which is odd because it's not the resolution it picks as the best one, since technically it's slightly padded, but it does work. The lower vertical refresh rate is what makes it harder to do than a normal 800x600@60 resolution it seems. This one above should worth though, the "-v -v" args show the different possible choices, and this one is not the final pick but it should be good.
This will have to be manually placed into /etc/X11/xorg.conf for now, after the normal d9800 monitor setup with 648x480@60 progressive, since I haven't got the setup menu able to do things like this with more advanced desktop resolutions for monitors like the d9800 yet.
Will the live CD work with an AVGA card or will I need to buy a "normal" ATI card? I only ask this because I have been unsure if Calamity's AVGA was flashed or not. I know that bitbytebit has a flashed 3000 but was unsure of the 9250 in Calamity's setup.
Again, Thanks so much for this. It has been a great 3 days reading this thread and getting excited about making my cab better.
It should hopefully work with the AVGA card just fine, calamity's isn't flashed, and I'm using my AVGA 3000 now unflashed (I flashed it back) just great with all of this. I'm curious of course that that version of the AVGA works the same as the older ones and my newer one. If not then it might need a similar fix that I did for the 3000 model, so the Linux kernel can work with it properly.
This newer ISO I am about to upload should be the best one to test, I'll announce it here later tonight hopefully. I'm working on the grub setup right now, so definitely should be nicer since it sounds like you'll need that improvement for dual boot. There is an issue I'm seeing when the grub setup isn't a real basic one where /dev/sda1 is the install partition, and I've hopefully fixed that but still testing if it really is fixed. Also again it contains the fixes for legacy radeon cards, although now looking it seems the hd2400 is not a legacy one, and if it does the same stuff the hd2600 AVGA 3000 does then you can definitely help me fix it too
. We'll see how it works and if it has the same issues, I'll have to get some logs and information from you about it and I can make it work with some additional fixes to the kernel.