Subject: Gamma on the Ultra 2: Definitive Answers

From: [email-masked] (R. P. Channing ["Rick"] Rodgers)
Date: Thu, 18 Sep 1997 18:45:47 -0400

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Dear MBONE Colleagues,

I've been hassling with SunService for most of the day trying to figure
out how gamma works on the ffb frame buffer of the UltraSPARC 2.
As these machines are becoming increasingly common in the multicast
community, I thought my findings would be of sufficient general interest
to share here.

It turns out that the rumor that Toerless reported is true -- you
get a choice between gamma=1.0 and gamma=2.2 on this platform.  Period.
I attach a document Sun supplied.  It amazes me that this information
has not been public prior to now -- it's from an internal document
which they promise to put up on their server.  One presumably gets
gamma=1.0 from the "-deflinear true" option to ffbconfig, though they
are not explicit about that here.  I'll send along further details
if I receive them.

Now to figure out why enabling 24-bit color disables my workstation
audio 8^( (yes, I know this sounds preposterous, but it's true!)...

Cheerio, Rick Rodgers
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From: Toerless Eckert <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 19 Sep 1997 00:55:34 +0200 (MET DST)

Well, i guess the question is really: Why did sun use a stupid RAMDAC on
the supposedly good Creator-Graphics, when they already knew a good one (like
on SX). The actual meta-question is: who is a person at sun that you
can effectively complain about these kind of things.

Toerless