On 13-10-07 10:08 PM, Hartmut W Sager wrote:

VESA???  I think VESA is from the 80386/80486 era, and that even Pentium 1 (desktop) computers started adopting the PCI bus for several reasons, including the replacement of the short-sighted VESA bus.  So, a Pentium 3 should heavily post-date VESA.  Roundtable mailing list Roundtable@muug.mb.ca http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/roundtable

Yes and no.

You're thinking of the VESA LocalBus slot, which was short-sighted only in the sense that it was designed by a bunch of video card mfgrs to make their products look good - it did exactly what it was supposed to, and it was cheap enough that m/b mfgrs (mostly) just implemented it without putting up a fight.

However, VESA, the association, continues to define standards for video-related things today.  Some of the most important bits are the spacing of the mounting holes on the back of LCDs (yes, seriously), and a common definition of how to set video cards into a certain resolution with a linear, non-accelerated, frame buffer mapped to a certain address space... this latter piece is what the X "VESA" driver supports, a lowest-common-denominator mode so that you can at least set the resolution correctly on pretty much any video card today.

-Adam

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