Sun

I can't run Doom on Solaris! This is serious businesses!

The default visual is 24-bit colour on this Ultra-3 (ATI RAGE Mobility M1 framebuffer). That works fine (Firefox, etc.) and is what I want by default. But Sun DGA Doom and sunxdoom won't run and complain with



Okay, says I, I'll run it in Xnest.



So I look at xdpyinfo, and dammit, it's right. There's only one visual defined, and it's TrueColor. I don't see an obvious way to set this, though I freely admit my Solaris ignorance. Does anyone know how to do this?

So, I get to answer my own question. The Ultra-3's RAGE Pro equivalent is an ATI Mobility M1, which confusingly Sun alternately calls M64 or PGX64 . (I did get Quake2 on it and was quite perturbed to see how badly it performs under OpenGL. Apparently the driver doesn't expose most of the 3D acceleration functionality. Looked nice, though. That said, the software renderer was scads faster.) Since this is a SPARC running Solaris 10, it runs Xsun, not Xorg.

For this purpose, m64config should work. On that page it says setting it to depth 32 allows 8-bit depth windows simultaneously, so I tried that, but it said /dev/fbs/m640 was not an M64 device.

Turns out Tadpole's Mobility M1 doesn't get seen as a PGX64 by the system, even though it is. However, I could tell what m64config was going to do to OWconfig, so I just added a depth="32" into the right stanza within OWconfig by hand under /etc/openwin and restarted, and Xsun duly came up in 32-bit mode and xdpyinfo now shows all the expected visuals.

Now fixed up, I was indeed able to get Xnest at 8-bit depth and sunxdoom (though not sundgadoom) will now actually start and run briefly within it before dying with "Broken pipe." (Neither will run "naked" against the regular Xserver, for some reason.) But the Quake software renderer works now too and that actually plays, so the problem is at least now with the OS somewhere and not the colour depth anymore.