Re: Help! Screen gone mad!

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 14:51:39 +0000, jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Jim)
wrote:

T i m <news@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Straight question if I may Jaimie (as you seem to know your hardware)
I didn't realise (till now) that the Apple PCI (are they?) video cards
aren't 'std' (from my PC viewpoint of course) cards, in spite of them
presumably being in an industry std slot? So, as I saw mention of them
possibly being 're-flashable' I assume they are actually physically
the same (model for model) as the 'PC' PCI video cards but just have
different firmware (video pages mapped to a different location or
format maybe)?

Correct. Although Macs use the same physical interfaces (AGP, PCI etc)
the firmware on the cards is different. No, I don't know why that should
be.

Does anyone know if that's still true for PCIe graphics cards? I've
asked before, but not got an answer. I'm suspecting not, from the
complete lack of "Mac version" tags on PCIe cards.

The firmware differences were to work with the OpenFirmware
initialisation code rather than the BIOS one, I believe. And I'm
certain that EFI is a superset of BIOS, so can deal with any
BIOS-capable devices.

Shame really. I liked ADC as a concept and would have liked to have seen
it grow beyond Apple. It neatly combined digital video signals, USB
signals, Firewire and power all though one socket, thus reducing cable
clutter.

I didn't know about the USB/FW part, that makes them a lot neater than
I thought.

Cheers - Jaimie
--
"Once you adopt the unix paradigm, the variants cease to be a problem - you
bitch, of course, but that's because bitching is fun, unlike M$ OS's, where
bitching is required to keep your head from exploding." - S Stremler in afc
.

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