Matrox + Sun Ultra10 - is it possible?

[Thundrchez]

Sun is getting a little more PC like in some of their workstations such as the Ultra10 and the Ultra5. They have IDE HD controllers that only work with proprietary IDE drives (what a headache, but that is a different story), and they have PCI slots.

Sun made one of their absolute worst decisions when they integrated an ATI video chip onto the Ultra5/Ultra10 motherboard. My old Sparc20 had video that looked much, much better than this ATI crap.

However, all is not lost. There is a way to install other PCI video cards as a replacement for the integrated ATI crap. We have looked at a Permedia2 based PCI card which is a good bit better. Additionally, it supports an 8 bit graphic overlay on top of a 24 bit desktop, which is something that ATI cannot do. If I am not mistaken, the new Linux beta XFree86 drivers for the Matrox G200 & G400 can also do this.

And finally to my question. Is there a way to get a Matrox PCI G200 (or G400?) video card to work with a Sun Ultra10 workstation? If so, can it support the 24 bit desktop with an 8 bit overlay?

[SteveC]

Don't know about unix environments enough to answer you - try asking this in the "Alternate lifestyles" forum as well.

But I do know that you wont find a PCI G400, only the G200 and G100 were ever PCI.

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Cheers,
Steve

"The chances of anything coming from Mars, are a million-to-one", he said.

[MegaManX4]

I cannot tell you if you can throw PC Hardware into that thing, but I'm very sure that there is no G400 PCI card available. But a friends g200 works quite fine.
Nearly the same performance as the AGP Version has.
Now, to say this is a little bit tricky, maybe you can... wait...I CAN DO THIS... you can put...(getting sick)... a Voodoo3 PCI Card in it if you do not get a G200 PCI (phew, THAT was hard! )

Mega


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K6-3 400Mhz@450Mhz
G400 16MB, 192MB Ram and so on

[Thundrchez]

NOooooo!!!! Voooooodoooooo is against my religion!

[Salmonius]

You can't do that because the g400 comes only in AGP. But even of you took a PCI card, I don't think it would work because of the on-board firmware. Last, and not least, there are no drivers for Matrox for Solaris sparc. So your stuck with a ATI RagePro if you don't feel like buying a Creator or elite.

It's all very sad... In fact, I was just discussing the idea of putting a g400 in a ultra80 today, but it was pointless.

Good idea though...

[Thundrchez]

It is not impossible. We have one eval system here that is an Ultra10 with a Permedia2 based PCI graphics card. I'm not the sysadmin, though, so I don't know what all was done to get it to work.

Oh, yeah, it also needs to support fixed frequency monitors. Ugh.

We've got a couple of Ultra80's as well. Dang nice machines, except for the memory riser card BS. It is too dang easy to mess up. For a while, one of them could only see 2G of ram when we had 4G installed in it. We had to get the mobo replaced in that puppy before it saw it all.

This kind of stuff is most likely nowhere near large enough of a market for Matrox to go after. There is one thing for certain, though. ATI sucks. It looks as if the Permedia2 solution is the best one out there right now.