XGA: A New Graphics Standard

Combine a fast VGA, a graphics coprocessor, and bus mastering, and you have XGA

XGA Adapter/A page

Author: Jake Richter
Source: BYTE, Feb 1991, pages 285-286, 288-290 (link)


Three and a half years after introducing both the VGA and 8514/A graphics standards, IBM has finally unveiled its next-generation PS/2 graphics hardware-the XGA (Extended Graphics Array).

In 1987, the VGA was shipped standard with the newly announced PS/2 systems. Now the XGA is shipped as the default graphics display platform with IBM's newest PS/2s, the Model 90 XP 486 and the Model 95 XP 486. In the desktop Model 90, the XGA is on the motherboard; in the Model 95 (a tower unit), it is located on a separate Micro Channel architecture add-in board. The XGA Display Adapter/A is also available for other 386- and i486-based PS/2s.

IBM's replacement of the VGA with the XGA as a default graphics platform is remarkable. A couple of years ago, rumors were rampant about IBM's implementing its 8514/A advanced graphics technology on PS/2 motherboards. But the 8514/A lacked one major feature that was necessary for this to occur: backward compatibility. The XGA's full VGA hardware compatibility eliminates this problem; therefore, it is suitable for a motherboard implementation.

In some ways, the XGA is a merger between the VGA and 8514/A graphics platforms. The table shows a feature comparison of several mass-market graphics hardware platforms demonstrating how the XGA has evolved.

The XGA Is Born  
The XGA was developed in the U.K. at IBM's Hursley Labs, as were the 8514/A and the niche-oriented Image Adapter/A. Therefore, it is not surprising that in its design the XGA maintains many of the 8514/A's features, although it accesses these features in a different fashion.

Some of the new features, such as bus mastering, are designed to take advantage of the Micro Channel architecture bus, which is standard in most PS/2s. Other features, such as a memory-mapped frame buffer and hardware cursor, provide greater flexibility over existing designs, easing the burden for software developers. Another boon to software developers is that IBM has released full register specifications for the XGA, unlike its tight-lipped approach to the 8514/A. An Adapter Interface comes with the XGA to provide backward compatibility for all those applications that supported the 8514/A via the Adapter Interface.

Multiple Modes

The XGA has three distinct modes: VGA compatibility, 132-column VGA-compatible text, and extended graphics. The extended-graphics mode is the most interesting, since it provides higher resolutions and substantial graphics acceleration.

In addition to maintaining full compatibility with the VGA standard it originally created, IBM learned some lessons from the vast number of VGA clones out there and implemented a larger data path. The VGA mode, while still having only an 8-bit internal data path, supports a 32-bit-wide bus. It also has an internal write cache that allows the chip to break down and write the bus data without holding up the rest of the system with unnecessary wait states.

According to IBM documents, when the XGA is in VGA mode, it is up to 90 percent faster than the original VGA under DOS and up to 50 percent faster under Windows. Except for performance improvements, there is no change in VGA functionality in this mode.

It's important to note, however, that while you can have up to eight XGAs in one system (the configuration software only supports up to six), you can only have one VGA active in the system at any one time. Therefore, if you switch an XGA into VGA mode, you must ensure that no other VGA is active in the system; otherwise, the system might crash due to I/O conflicts.

Using the 132-column text mode (a VGA extension), you can display and manipulate 132 characters per line of text on the screen. The character width is 8 pixels for a virtual horizontal resolution of 1056. Character height depends on the font used, which means that you can have text screen resolutions of 132 by 43, 132 by 50, or 132 by 60 pixels.

Currently, you can access the 132-column text mode only by manually manipulating the XGA registers. Ultimately, however, this mode will be accessible by switching into video mode 14 (hexadecimal). For all practical purposes, note that the 132-column text mode is a VGA mode and the same multiple-VGA caveat applies.

The extended-graphics mode has many exciting features, such as 65,536 colors (i.e. , 1,024- by 768-pixel resolution) , bus mastering, drawing acceleration, and the hardware cursor. While some of this mode's features are available in the other modes, most of the XGA registers and functions are dedicated for use in the extended-graphics mode.

Note:  I don't see how 64K colors has anything to do with 1,024x768 pixel resolution. Maybe the author meant "65,536 colors at 640x480 pixel resolution".

XGA Registers  
The XGA design consists of video RAM, a type of dual-ported RAM designed for use in graphics-display systems; glue logic; and two custom chips, the graphics coprocessor and the display controller, which are the core of the XGA (see the photo). The graphics coprocessor controls VGA compatibility, drawing functions, and memory management, and the display controller contains the RAM D/A converter (RAMDAC) with a color lookup table, the CRT controller, hardware cursor support, and a VRAM serializer (a device that extracts data from VRAM for display).

Note:
U10 - 37F0842 [INMOS IMS G190 Serializer Palette DAC]
U11 - TC110GC9AG [INMOS IMS G200 XGA Display Controller]
U34-U41 Toshiba TC524256BZ-10 or NEC D42274V-10 VRAM 

Access to the XGA is accomplished via two sets of registers: The first set is mapped into the system's I/O space, while the other set of registers is mapped into memory. The addresses of these registers vary, due to the configurability of the XGA. This variable addressing allows for multiple XGAs in the same system.

The I/O registers are mapped in at a hexadecimal I/O address of 21X0, where X is the instance (or occurrence) of the XGA. According to IBM, in systems with only one XGA, the instance is typically 6, resulting in a base hexadecimal I/O address of 2160.

The memory-mapped registers occupy 128 bytes of memory in the last kilobyte of an 8K-byte chunk. This chunk resides on an 8K-byte boundary anywhere between PC addresses 0C0000h and 0DFFFFh. The purpose of having an 8K-byte chunk is that the first 7K bytes of the chunk contains ROM data, but only on an XGA Display Adapter/ A. The motherboard implementation of the XGA does not require its own ROM, as the main motherboard ROMs contain all the necessary information, such as XGA initialization code. The XGA instance number determines the location of the 128 bytes within the 8K-byte chunk.

The I/O registers pertain predominantly to the XGA's display controller. The memory-mapped registers, however, refer primarily to the graphics coprocessor. The XGA's power-on self test routines set the base addresses for both registers, and by examining the PS/2 POST registers for the XGA in question, you can determine the addresses.

Many of the memory-mapped registers are 32 bits in size, because the XGA is designed to fit into a 32-bit environment like that of the Intel 386 and i486. Also, due to the software support IBM developed for the XGA, it only works in a 386 or 386-based PS/2 (including 386SX-based PS/2s). The XGA also offers Motorola format addressing (a different byte ordering compared to an Intel format), which allows a Motorola 68000 or similar processor to take advantage of the XGA, assuming the XGA was ported to such hardware environs.

Initialization

Initialization is a necessary step in using any graphics device. In the case of the XGA, initialization mainly involves setting the XGA into extended-graphics mode via the operating-mode register. You can then generate the proper CRT control register data for the desired resolution. Selectable resolutions are 640 by 480 and 1024 by 768 pixels. But you can only access the 640- by 480-pixel by 65,536-color and 1,024- by 768-pixel by 256-color modes with 1 megabyte of RAM.

The 16-bit-per-pixel (65,536-color) resolution provides almost perfect photo-realistic output. Thus, you can scan or capture a full-color picture and, using this 65,536-color mode, see an almost exact replica on your XGA screen. The 16-bit pixel is laid out as 5 bits of red, 6 bits of green, and 5 bits of blue (5-6-5), or in other words, 32 shades of blue, 64 shades of green, and 32 shades of blue-in each pixel.

This configuration varies from the PC standard TARGA format of 5-5-5 ( 1 bit is used for overlay) and the i860 format of 6-6-4. According to a technical contact at IBM, the 5-6-5 approach was used because of other similar implementations already in place in various IBM installations.

Apparently, the eye is also more sensitive to variations in green than in red or blue. (The reason for the choice of red, green, and blue is that these are the three color guns found in all color monitors. The beams from the three guns combine to display just about any color, depending on the intensity of each gun.)

The Display Controller  
You use the display controller during initialization, but it has other uses as well. Two such uses are the color lookup table and the sprite. The sprite is a 64- by 64-pixel block that overlays the screen.

Note: U20 32K Sprite Memory

You use the lookup table to translate the 1-, 2-, 4-, or 8-bit pixel value into appropriate RGB values. The pixel value is used as an index into the lookup table. The resultant RGB values are then converted from digital levels into analog voltage levels via a built-in DAC.

As with the VGA and 8514/A, the XGA's lookup table supports 64 levels (6 bits) of each primary color, for a total of 262,144 possible color combinations. Thus, in a 256-color mode, you can choose 256 colors from this palette of 262,144.

Each pixel in the sprite has four possible values: sprite color 0, sprite color 1 , transparent, and complement. Special registers define the sprite colors, and they let you specify the RGB values for each color. These RGB values are passed directly to the DAC . Their use permits applications to fully modify the local color palette without having to save two entries for the cursor or your having to worry about the cursor changing color as it goes over various portions of the display.

The transparency setting allows cursors that are smaller than 64 by 64 pixels to be defined. Users who want a cursor that is always visible against any background can use the complement setting.

Task Switching  
One of the biggest headaches for systems software developers in creating a multitasking environment is saving the current state of the graphics hardware to allow another application to take over the graphics device. This state save also has to account for the possibility that the hardware might be in the middle of an operation or a palette update.

The XGA was apparently designed with task switching in mind, because it has extensive facilities for saving and restoring the state of the hardware, including interrupted operations.

Defining Drawing Space  
One of the XGA's features that is unique among current PC graphics standards is the use of bit maps, which must be defined to perform any drawing function. These bit maps are linear regions of memory that are defined with a pixel width, height, and depth (or bits per pixel). As such, an 8-bit-per-pixel bit map, with a width of 10 and a height of 6 pixels, would require 60 bytes of memory. The last pixel/byte of a given line of the bit map is directly adjacent in memory to the first pixel/byte in the following line.

The best feature of these bit maps is that they can exist anywhere in the system's address and memory space. Thus, if you define a bit map that resides in your program's data area, the XGA can draw into it or read from it, saving you the effort of manually copying data to and from the XGA (i.e., with your system processor).

The XGA VRAM is mapped into the system's address space so that when you want to specify it for a bit-map definition, you just use its address. The VRAM is usually located in the upper, most addresses of the 386's 4-gigabyte address space. As a result, there should never be a memory conflict.

Bus-Mastering Pitfalls  
When the XGA accesses a bit map, it determines whether the access is local (VRAM) or remote (system) . For remote access, the XGA arbitrates for the bus and starts accessing system memory. Here is where the XGA's bus-mastering capability comes into play. There is additional overhead in the use of system memory for bit maps, beyond that being used for accessing local VRAM. But there is also the performance benefit of having the XGA processor manipulate memory while the system processor is doing something else.

This bus mastering has some potential pitfalls. The 386 and i486 processors support virtual memory via an internal pagemapping table. The page-mapping table allows control applications, such as expanded-memory managers, DOS extenders, and advanced operating systems, to create virtual PC addresses 4K bytes (or a page) at a time. So, while the software application thinks it is writing data to address WWWWW, the pagemapping table might translate that address to physical address QQQQQ.

In many cases, there is no way for an application to know that the address it is using is not the physical address. And, to properly bus master, the XGA requires a physical address; otherwise, it may copy data to and from an incorrect address, with disastrous results. There is a possible solution to this dilemma, however, with some control software environments.

If an application has access to the control software's pagemapping table, it can pass this information to the XGA, which then makes use of the page-mapping table, and it can do its own virtual-to-physical address translations. Unfortunately, many control programs and operating systems do not provide access to the page-mapping table. I n any case, regular DOS applications have the best chance of using bus mastering, because the first 640K bytes of memory are generally the least likely to be virtualized.

In addition to always having the VRAM mapped into high memory, software can map the XGA into a 64K-byte bank at either A0000h or B0000h, the standard PC video-memory addresses. Accessing different 64K-byte banks in the XGA's VRAM via this approach requires only that an index value be written into the aperture index register. This banking mechanism is handy for real-mode applications. Alternatively, the whole 1-MB chunk of VRAM can be mapped somewhere in the first 16MB of the system's memory, assuming there is no memory conflict. This type of mapping is useful only for protected-mode applications.

With respect to the bit maps, the XGA has three generic bit maps available for definition: maps A, B, and C. These maps are referenced when drawing commands are executed.

The drawing commands may require one or more bit maps: source, destination, and pattern. Source bit maps contain the data you want to either copy or use as a tile; destination bit maps are those into which you draw or copy data; and pattern bit maps contain a monochromatic (1-bit-per-pixel) pattern that you can use as an area pattern or a pixel-exclusion pattern.

The XGA also supports an additional map, referred to as the mask map. The mask map is a monochromatic bit map that you use to perform arbitrary clipping (i.e. , a method of clipping to nongeometric shapes). When enabled, each 0 bit in the map indicates a pixel that should not be modified during a drawing operation, while a 1 bit is a signal to draw the applicable pixel. If the dimension of the mask map is smaller than that of the destination map for a given operation, then the outer edges of the mask map also define a clipping rectangle.

The mask map is extremely useful in windowing environments where you have overlapping windows, because you can draw on underlying windows without having to manually preclip all the objects you're drawing. Instead, you just define a mask map that permits drawing only in the exposed area of the desired window. A full-screen 1,024- by 768-pixel mask map occupies only 96K bytes of memory. You can also partially enable a mask map so that it acts only as a clipping rectangle and does not perform the arbitrary pixel-by-pixel clip.

All four maps are defined via 5-pixel map registers. The first pixel in the bit map, which is in the upper left corner of a display bit map, has a coordinate of 0,0. The mask-map origin registers define the mask-map position over the destination map. All maps are limited to a height and width of 4096 by 4096 pixels.

Drawing with the XGA  
Before you can draw anything with the XGA, you must at least define the destination map for the operation you want to perform. Some operations also require a source map, such as a BitBlt. A BitBlt is an operation that copies bits from one place to another. The available drawing operations on the XGA are lines, short vectors, filled rectangles, BitBlts, and area fills.

Unfortunately, drawing lines is not as simple as just providing an x,y coordinate pair. The XGA uses a Bresenham line drawing algorithm, but you must first calculate the initial Bresenham parameters, a process that creates a bit of overhead when drawing short lines. Coincidentally, the method for calculating these parameters is virtually identical to that used in drawing lines on the 8514/A. A description of this algorithm for optimized line drawing on computer displays can be found in Foley and Van Dam's Fundamentals of Interactive Computer Graphics (Addison-Wesley, 1982).

The XGA's short vectors are similar to the 8514/A's short stroke vectors. These vectors can be up to 15 pixels in length, and they can point in any direction that is a multiple of 45 degrees (e. g . , horizontal, vertical, and diagonal). The benefit of the XGA's short vectors is that the definition for each one consumes only a byte, and up to 4 bytes can be passed at a time, allowing for a quick data transfer rate and, therefore, a quick drawing rate.

Filled rectangles are quite straightforward. You just specify a width, height, and position, and off you go. BitBlts are similar to a filled rectangle except that you have to specify a source map as well as a destination map. The XGA also has the ability to perform a simple color-expansion BitBlt, one in which the source is monochromatic and each 0 bit is converted to one color and each 1 bit to another color. The destination map can be anything from 1 to 8 bits in depth. Color expansion is useful for displaying rendered fonts on a high-color-content screen or bit map.

Area fills are a modified rectangle fill in which the XGA graphics coprocessor uses the pattern map as a guideline for a scan conversion. This type of fill uses 1 -bit flags to toggle the fill state as it scans each line in the pattern bit map. Initially, for each line, the fill state is off. On hitting a 1 bit, each subsequent pixel (or bit) in the pattern map is filled until the next 1 bit is encountered.

Lines, short vectors, and filled rectangles can also use a source map and a pattern map. You can use the pattern map for line patterns and area patterns, while you can use the source map for tiling a region (in the case of a filled rectangle) or for providing a color line pattern for lines and short vectors.

All the drawing functions are also affected by four types of drawing modifiers: drawing colors, mixes, color compare, and the pixel bit mask. Drawing colors are simple to use. The foreground color specifies what color you would normally draw in, while the background color specifies the color you would use in color expansions (for a 0 bit) .

Mixes, known as raster operations or raster ops on other graphics platforms, provide a mechanism by which the destination pixel (the one in the destination map at the current drawing position) and the source pixel (the foreground color or source map pixel) are mixed. A typical mix is XOR, the exclusive OR operation, which is used for cursors and highlights.

You can use color compare during normal pixel updates to determine whether a given pixel should be updated, based on its color. The destination pixel value (or color) is compared to the destination color-compare value register by using the compare operation set in the destination color-compare condition. Therefore, if the result of the comparison is TRUE, the pixel is not updated.

There are eight compare conditions: always TRUE, always FALSE, greater than, less than, equal to, not equal to , less than or equal to, and greater than or equal to. This color comparison can be useful in cases where you need to protect a range of colors from being updated, such as background and foreground objects in graphical scenery.

The pixel bit mask controls which bits in a pixel can be modified. Its biggest use is in protecting binary color ranges and planes of color.

Why XGA?
From a technical standpoint, the XGA is a very elegant piece of work. It fixes just about all the problems that the 85 14/ A has had, except interlaced displays and simplified line drawing. The added features-definable bit maps, bus mastering, memory mapping, and state saving-are well thought out. Software developers who want to get the most out of the XGA should find them quite useful.

In addition, IBM has finally made the right move in providing full register-level documentation on the XGA. The lack of this type of documentation hurt the acceptance of the 8514/A. The fact that IBM has provided it for the XGA should increase the level of support it receives.

Because of its high-powered nature, the XGA will probably not have a serious effect on Super VGAs or 8514/A clones in the short term. But it is reasonable to expect XGA clones to be announced before the end of this year.

Jake Richter is the president of Panacea, Inc. , a graphics software development and consulting company located in Londonderry, New Hampshire.

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