tlug: Display resolutions

[Dennis McMurchy <denismcm@example.com>]

  Best wishes for 1998 to all TLUGers.

  On the last day of the old year my monitor died and I replaced it with
the Eizo/Nanao 17" Flexscan E53F that I had been coveting for a long time.

  I have a Matrox Mystique 220 card driving it, and I'm using the latest
XFree SVGA Server (3.3.1, I think)  and SuSe's latest refinement of the
3.3.1 SVGA Server (a separate installation). Both servers behave exactly
the same.

  I love the new monitor, which gives a much crisper image than the old
clunker I had, but I'm puzzled by what happens at higher resolutions
than the 1024x768 that I used to use.  

  When I tried putting a 1152x864 in my modeline, I got the resolution 
alright, but there was a five centimeter wide strip down the right side of
the screen that was not used.  I was unable to shift or expand the 
screen image into that area using the firmware in the monitor.

  My current modeline is as follows:

        Modes       "1024x768" "1280x1024" "800x600" "640x480"

  The initial 1024x768 is fine, and I can 'pan' into the unseen areas of
the virtual 1280x1024 screen that it is a window into just fine.  When I
switch to the 1280x1024 resolution, though, I'm actually getting something
like 1260x900, and I cannot 'pan' into the unseen area at the bottom of the
screen at all.  I can bring the 'missing' part of the image into view by
tweaking the settings in the monitor's firmware, but this results in an
image that is grossly compressed along the vertical axis, and also
leaves an unused strip of screen several centimeters wide across the
top of the screen.  

  1260 I can live with, but 900 means that there's almost four
centimeters of inaccessible image at the bottom of the screen.  This
problem persists even when I scale back from a Default Colour Depth of
16 -> 8 .  Things are also the same even when the 1280x1024 resolution
comes first in the modeline.  

  I never expected this kind of problem and have no idea what is wrong.
Is it the monitor?  The Matrox card?  Or is this a bug in the 'alpha-going-
on-beta' Mystique support in XFree?  Any ideas or solutions would be much
appreciated.

  Cheers, 

Dennis McMurchy, 
Sointula, B.C. / Tojinmachi, Fukuoka
Canada           Japan



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