A/UX & third party video cards compatibility ?

[zefrenchtoon]

Hi!

I was thinking about a third party video card to put in a IIsi to run A/UX (like a radius or an interware).

Does anyone know if there are video card compatible with A/UX or not ?


Thanks for reading !

 

[halkyardo]

In my experience, A/UX definitely can be picky about video cards - it does some clever tricks running video card drivers in a restricted Toolbox environment inside the kernel. In theory, well-behaved cards and drivers will work fine, but compatibility is far from guaranteed.

Both of the cards I own have quirks under A/UX in my IIfx - my Memory Plus 24NB will sometimes cause a hang at boot unless it's the only card in the system, and my E-Machines Futura SX will only do 16 colors in A/UX, despite being able to do 256 under Mac OS. So while it's not quite as helpful as a recommendation, I'd suggest those as ones to avoid!

Some third-party cards definitely are just fine under A/UX, though - many years ago, I had A/UX running on my IIfx with a pair of Radius Two Page Display monitors, driven by Radius video cards of some description (can't remember the exact models, unfortunately).

 

[cheesestraws]

Yes, as @halkyardo says A/UX 3/3.1 makes a valiant attempt to run the Mac video drivers, and it does unreasonably well at this given the differences between the OSes. IIRC, the same is not true of earlier A/UX versions, some of which did require special drivers. I do not know where the cutoff is. It's the usual story with A/UX: "well-behaved" mac-compatible things work, but it's not necessarily trivial to find out what's well-behaved in advance. I don't have any really strong pointers for you here other than "if you already have cards in the cupboard, try them, because there's a good chance one of them will work"

 

[zefrenchtoon]

Thanks for all your answers !

To add to your information, I found a pdf version of the Interware GrandVimage Manual in Japanese which states that GrandVimage cards work "officially" with A/UX 2 & 3 (but without acceleration, zoom and extended monitor options)

 

[eharmon]

Relatedly, anyone know what new cards this update adds support to, and/or if this update was included with 3.0.1?

Apple - Software Updates for X11 Server Update For A/UX 3.0

 

[zigzagjoe]

Little late now, but FWIW my 30Video SI cards do also support A/UX, at least 3.0.

 

[Taniwha]

(I'm one of the original A/UX developers) mac cards need a special resource in their slot roms for A/UX, not all of them have it (I forget the details, even though I wrote the original spec, it's a little bit of code that knows how to change modes)