Open-Source ATI Rage 128 Driver Gets Revived

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 5 May 2014 at 10:43 AM EDT. 24 Comments
X.ORG
The open-source X.Org driver for the ancient ATI Rage 128 graphics processors has been revived in recent months.

The xf86-video-r128 driver supports all of the old ATI Rage 128 graphics cards including the Rage Fury AGP, XPERT 128 AGP, and XPERT 99. The Rage 128 was ATI's best graphics processor back in 1998 and fabbed on a 250nm processor, supporting 32MB and 64MB video memory configurations, and its core was clocked around 100MHz... Its OpenGL compliance stands at version 1.2. While it's hard to believe the Rage 128 is still being used in any production capacity, especially with modern Linux environments, the open-source X.Org driver for it has been revived.

Connor Behan has been updating the R128 driver code over the past two months and rewrote most of its (user-space) mode-setting code so this old driver can now support the X.Org Resize and Rotate (RandR) extension. The code in some regards is close to the xf86-video-ati driver's former UMS support. While the Rage 128 hardware is approaching two decades old, there's still a monitor detection issue due to some missing register documentation on the Rage 128.

Anyone wishing to learn about this recent open-source Rage 128 Linux driver work for nostalgic purposes can read about it on the X.Org mailing list.
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