[Suns-at-Home] E3500

[der Mouse]

>>> There are _no_ single-slot SBUS framebuffers available that render
>>> greater than 256 colors, AFAIK
>> Check out the SUNW,leo for an example
> Well, I did say "AFAIK" ;^)

You did, I must agree. :)

> I think there were _some_, but thye are so rare, and by now so
> under-powered, as to be approaching irrelevance for many
> applications.

Under-powered?  You didn't say anything about having rendering engines
onboard or anything, just "greater than 256 colors".  Yes, if you want
a rendering engine, you probably won't be satisfied with *any* SBus
framebuffers; they mostly predate that sort of thing, and the ones that
do have them have engines from their era.

>> There's also the S24, [...]
> Since the target is an E2500, I didn't consider single platform
> solutions an option

True, it's not an answer to the need which started the thread.  I
mentioned it for completeness, in that it's a possible answer to the
question implicit in the statement you made, not because I thought it
would help meet the original need.

> (and the S24 is dog slow as well, by current standards)...

By nearly any standards, actually.  It's got *very* limited
acceleration, and 24bpp dumb-framebuffer *is* dog-slow for just about
anything more than putting up static pictures.  (About all the S24 can
accelerate is solid-colour rectangle fills, and rectangle-to-rectangle
copies, and even those it can't accelerate all that much.)  Perhaps
fortunately, the S24 does support 8bpp access for screen areas for
which 8bpp is enough, and that view is as fast as any 8bpp framebuffer.
The acceleration which is present also helps, though less than it does
at 24bpp.

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