fullscreen support for games

[Jaymz Julian]

On Sun, Oct 23, 2005 at 10:08:23PM +0200, Andre Heynatz wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I want to know if it is possible for applications to take over the graphics hardware. I have tried to run a Windows game through Wine which is a few years old (Might & Magic VI). Running the game changes the screen resolution which is very nice, but an error message says that the game wants to have 16 bpp depth, whereas the desktop has 32 bpp. I wonder if an application (in this case the Wine DirectX layer) can request a screen depth change.

I believe that DGA2 actually supports depth changes, but of course that 
doesn't play nice with 3d on many/most (all?) drivers.  Of course, there
is a whole list of things that you can't do with DGA, actually, ignoring the 
whole security danger of it.  But it does provide the whole "exclusive
fullscreen" functionality that you suggest.

Wine even supports DGA with a few config file tweaks, btw - but of course
you need to be able to write to /dev/mem or whatever it's called these 
days.  Dunno if it supports enough DGA for depth change, though.

	-- jj
-- 
Jaymz Julian - Coder, Visionary, Fat Ass.
"Hannibal is a serial killer. He only likes to kill and eat people. 
 Very few people have `I want to be killed and eaten' on their cards, 
 so Hannibal is out of a job." - http://cards.sf.net