VGA(4)                    OpenBSD Programmer's Manual                   VGA(4)

NAME
     vga - VGA graphics driver for wscons

SYNOPSIS
     vga0 at isa?
     vga* at pci?
     wsdisplay* at vga? console ?

DESCRIPTION
     This driver handles VGA graphics hardware within the wscons(4) console
     framework.  It doesn't provide direct device driver entry points but
     makes its functions available via the internal wsdisplay(4) interface.

     The vga driver supports multiple virtual screens on one physical display.
     The screens allocated on one display can be of different ``types'', where
     a type refers to various display properties.  The type is determined at
     the time the virtual screen is created and can't be changed later.
     Screens are either created at kernel startup (then the default type is
     used) or later with help of the wsconscfg(8) utility.

     Currently, the following screen types are supported:

     80x25   This is the standard VGA text mode with 80 columns and 25 rows.
             16 different colors can be displayed at the same time.  Charac-
             ters are 8 x 16 pixels large, and a font consists of 256 charac-
             ters.  A built-in font of this size is always present on a VGA
             card.  It's also possible to use a downloaded font instead.

     80x25bf A modified version of the previous.  It only allows 8 colors to
             be displayed.  In exchange, it can access two fonts at the same
             time, so that 512 different characters can be displayed.

     80x40   A text mode with 80 colums and 40 rows.  Similar to the standard
             mode, 16 colors and 256 characters are available.  Characters are
             8 x 10 pixels large.  For this mode to be useful, a font of that
             character size must be downloaded.

     80x40bf A modified version of the previous.  It only allows 8 colors to
             be displayed.  In exchange, it can access two fonts at the same
             time, so that 512 different characters can be displayed.

     80x50   A text mode with 80 colums and 50 rows.  Similar to the standard
             mode, 16 colors and 256 characters are available.  Characters are
             8 x 8 pixels large.  For this mode to be useful, a font of that
             character size must be downloaded.

     80x50bf A modified version of the previous.  It only allows 8 colors to
             be displayed.  In exchange, it can access two fonts at the same
             time, so that 512 different characters can be displayed.

     80x24   A variant of the ``80x25'' screen type which displays 24 lines
             only.  It uses the standard 8x16 VGA font.  This mode might be
             useful for applications which depend on closer DEC VT100 compati-
             bility.

     80x24bf A modified version of the previous.  It only allows 8 colors to
             be displayed.  In exchange, it can access two fonts at the same
             time, so that 512 different characters can be displayed.

     The vga driver can display fonts of the original IBM type and ISO-8859-1
     encoded fonts.  As an experimental feature, the ``higher half'' fonts of
     the former OpenBSD/i386 pcvt(4) driver distribution can be used too if
     option WSCONS_SUPPORT_PCVTFONTS was set at kernel compile time.  This is
     only useful with the ``*bf'' screen types; a font containing the ASCII
     range of characters must be available too on this screen.

SEE ALSO
     isa(4), pcdisplay(4), pci(4), wscons(4), wsconscfg(8), wsfontload(8)

BUGS
     Only a subset of the possible text modes is supported.

     VGA cards are supposed to emulate an MDA if a monochrome display is con-
     nected.  In this case, the device will naturally not support colors at
     all, but offer the capability to display underlined characters instead.
     The ``80x25bf'', ``80x40bf'', ``80x50bf'', and ``80x24bf'' screen types
     will not be available.  This mode of operation is not tested.

OpenBSD 2.9                     March 20, 1999                               2
