User running Medley on SunOS

[Paolo Amoroso]

Bluesky user DVRC is trying to run Medley on SunOS 4.1.4 under QEMU. He managed to compile Maiko and boot the environment.

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Paolo Amoroso | Blog | Mastodon

[Michele Denber]

On 8/11/2026 7:22 AM, Paolo Amoroso wrote:

Bluesky user DVRC is trying to run Medley on SunOS 4.1.4 under QEMU. He managed to compile Maiko and boot the environment.

Yes that works really well - and in color too!



             - Michele

[Matt Heffron]

Naïve questions:

• It looks like 8-bit color, maybe even only 4-bit, right?
• Is that limited to lower screen dimensions than what we have for B/W on X11?
• Is Maiko managing this display totally differently than it does for X11? (or SDL?)

 

Matt

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[Michele Denber]

On 8/11/2026 4:54 PM, Matt Heffron wrote:

Naïve questions:

• It looks like 8-bit color, maybe even only 4-bit, right?
• Is that limited to lower screen dimensions than what we have for B/W on X11?
• Is Maiko managing this display totally differently than it does for X11? (or SDL?)

It's using an emulated Sun CG-3 graphics card so yes, it' 8 bit color.  Its resolution is 1152 x 900 so that's all you get.  I don't know what Maiko's doing.  Interestingly, if you move the mouse off the edge of the screen you get a completely independent b/w screen with the same Lisp session in it.

            - Michele

[Nick Briggs]

It doesn't use X11 in this case - it's direct drawing on /dev/fb, it maps the display card's memory into Lisp memory, and it uses the Sun pixrect library for some operations and its own line-drawing code for others.  It has support for 256 entry colormaps.  There's some code to cope with the target display being 24 bpp (the Sun cgeight board).  Nothing was over 1152 x 900 that I recall - and it eats Lisp memory to make that display byte map.  Since it takes control of the whole display no other application windows can be running.  It also deals with the 1-bpp and 8-bpp Lisp displays by switching the card mode between monochrome and color as you move the mouse cursor off the edge of the screen - so you can't see both the monochrome and color screen at the same time.

On the Dorado you had both monochrome and color screens visible at the same time - with some work we can add X11 (and SDL, perhaps) code that would work that way, but there'd still be a limit on how many pages the color display memory could consume, as it's exactly the same memory mapped architecture.

-- Nick

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[Michele Denber]

On 8/12/2026 1:10 PM, Nick Briggs wrote:
> ...

>
> On the Dorado you had both monochrome and color screens visible at the
> same time - with some work we can add X11 (and SDL, perhaps) code that
> would work that way, but there'd still be a limit on how many pages
> the color display memory could consume, as it's exactly the same
> memory mapped architecture.

The color board on the D0 also outputs 8 bit color, 640x480 to a
separate monitor.  It uses the D0's RAM for its frame buffer.  Same
thing - moving the cursor off one monitor causes it to appear on the
other.  I don't think you could move windows between monitors though. 
We'll know when I reconnect it to my D0.

            - Michele

[Paolo Amoroso]

And now Medley is running on a SPARCstation 10.