good times, man, good times

> WRITE ROUGH DRIVER

After several days, you have driver ready to test.

> INSTALL DRIVER AND TEST

You reboot the machine. The screen is blank.

> RUN ‘minicom’ ON LAPTOP

The ‘minicom’ terminal emulator is now running in an XTerm on the laptop.

> PRESS ALT-SYSRQ ON MACHINE

Nothing happens.

> PLUG SERIAL CABLE INTO LAPTOP

The “kdebug>” prompt from the kernel debugger appears on the XTerm.

> EXAMINE REGISTERS

After thirty minutes, you determine that two of the sync registers are set incorrectly.

> FIX BUGS IN DRIVER AND TEST

You can’t see anything.

> REBOOT IN SAFE MODE AND FIX BUGS

A new version of the driver is ready to test.

> TEST

You reboot the machine. You see a color BeOS desktop.

> TEST MODES

You switch to 800*600. It looks fine.
You switch to 1024*768. It looks fine.
You switch to 1152*864. There are pixel sparkles on the screen.

> PRESS ALT-SYSRQ ON MACHINE

> YES, IT DOES!

Oh, sorry, I forgot. You get a “kdebug>” prompt.

> EXAMINE SYNC REGISTERS

After forty minutes, you find nothing wrong with the registers.

> EXAMINE REGISTER 0x6000 

Register 0x6000 (FIFO watermarks) contains 0x0201 (powerup default).

> WRITE 0x0200 TO REGISTER 0x6000 

This is one of the poorly documented registers. Are you sure you want to do this?

> YES

The screen goes blank.