Graphics in my PWS433au Miata

[Terry A. Bowling]

Jay, I bet you can clear this up for me...

I have a number of PWS433au's running Digital Unix 4.0d and one PWS600au running RH7.1.  I want to give Debian a try on one of the 433's.

The 600 has a PBXGK-BB graphics card which is an Elsa Gloria Synergy 8 (aka Powerstorm 4D10T, I believe this is a Permedia2 chipset with 8MB ram).

The 433 has a PBXGB-AA graphics card which I believe to be a Powerstorm 3D30 using the Cirrus Logic CL-GD5429 chipset with 2MB ram.

I just updated the 433 to SRM V7.2 with the Compaq 6.0 update CD.  If I put the Elsa card into the 433 and booted to SRM, I get the following error message:
Illegal device detected on primary bus in physical slot 4
Power down the system and remove the unsupported device from slot 4

My questions are:
1.  Will the Elsa card work in the 433's?  It works great in the 600 with same SRM version.
2.  Does the Powerstorm 3D30 card really only have 2MB and how well supported is it under XFree4x.
3.  Since we have the 3D30 in our 433's under DU4.0D, we have problems with "running out of colours."  Is there anything I can do to squeeze more performance out of these without upgrading to True64?

I know some of the Digital Unix questions might be considered off topic, but I really felt this might help others as well.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

[Terry A. Bowling]

Sorry, I figured out question 1.  I have 32 bit pci slots and 64 bit pci slots.  I put the Elsa card into the same 64 bit slot that I took the 3D30 card out of and I got the error below.  If I put the Elsa into a 32bit slot, SRM comes up with no problems.

I'm still interested in responses on questions 2 & 3 though.

Thanks, Terry...

[Donsbach, Jeff]

I will try and answer 2 and 3 since you already solved 1. Jay can correct me if necessary.

 

2. Yes, the 3D30 only has 2MB of memory. 8bpp (256 colors) is the best you are going to get out of this board. This is a TGA2 card (as is the 4D20 which uses the same chip but has 16MB and can do 24bpp). Jay submitted driver code for the TGA2 and I think it is there in XF4.0.1 or later IIRC.

 

3. Runnig out of colors on a card like this is common, especially if you have a colormap hogging app like Netscape running combined with a color hungry desktop like CDE, KDE or GNOME. I am not sure I understand your question. What do you mean "without upgrading to True64" ? You are already running 4.0D, right? You mean upgrade to V4.0F or V5.<something>. That won't prevent you running out of colors. Are you running CDE? Set your desktop preferences to use minimal colors. That will help a little. When you run Netscape, use the "-install" option which will tell Netscape to use it's own private colormap. You still might see "flashing" when moving focus in and out of Netscape though.

 

If all else fails, go find another Permedia 2 card to replace the 3D30 if the color flashing really bothers you that much. I found one for $35 a while back.

Jeff Donsbach