On Fri, Sep 15, 2000 at 10:12:55AM -0700, Sean 'Shaleh' Perry wrote: > A laptop's LCD screen is only good for one resolution. I throw a wide > range of numbers at it and it picks the only one that works.
Both laptops I've worked with could handle different resolutions. The older, Pentium 120 laptop, with C&T display card, has a 800x600 panel, and I think does "integer scaling" (don't know what the official name for it is.) Thus I think it used 640x600 pixels if you use mode 320x200. I remember using it at 800x600, 640x480 (which didn't fill the panel, of course), and 320x200 - I still want to go back at it and throw more interesting modes at it... I cannot remember if I've done any mode other than 800x600 under linux. The laptop I work on at this moment, does proper scaling, with smoothing, of many modes. (My text mode is "anti aliased"... <g>) I have thrown at it: 1024x768, 800x600, 640x480, 640x400, 512x384, 480x300, 400x300, 320x240, 320x200, as well as 352x240... all of them were scaled up to 1024x768, by hardware, with smoothing... brilliant. Note, however, that this only works with the XF86_SVGA server. (And the "normal" modes under M$Windows also works like this.) Running the Mach64 server on this display at anything other than 1024x768 "melts" it, and the only solution is hardware power-off... keyboard doesn't work either. My XF86Config thus has only 1024x768 specified for "accelerated" servers. I have given up on multiple modes and video mode switching with Mach64, so I use the SVGA server when I need it. Oh, I haven't mentioned in this mail yet: it is an ATI Rage Mobility display card. This is why the fixed dot-clock makes sense: the display card is always outputting 1024x768 - which is also why the hsync and vsync are pretty meaningless. (As long as I enter any "valid" modeline, the card will work at that resolution, with a dotclock of 65.15, and xvidtune will report a refresh rate based on the resolution and that dotclock. The modifications that can be made to the mode by xvidtune, have no effect whatsoever. All I must do now, is figure out what is the simplest way of making a modeline "valid" - i.e. not rejected by the X server, then I can probably try any arbitrary resolution. I still want to try 4x3... ;) I have now realised that the old Pentium120 will then possibly NOT have a fixed dotclock, it can likely depend on the scaled resolution, thus for 320x200 it will have a dotclock that is necessary to output 640x600(?) I will only be able to test this in two and a half weeks' time, unless I can squeeze it in on Thursday (maybe). But I can try a twisted mode on this laptop... Hugo van der Merwe
