I did mention in an earlier post that I will discuss in more detail about r128 DDX’s present standby resume functionality. In general, when it comes to dealing with standby resume, it puts the developer in a tough spot if the OS completely locks up after standby resume. In my case, I am sort of in this situation presently with the following computer.

• AMD Sempron 3200+ (Socket 939)
• ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2
• 1 GB DDR400 DDR SDRAM (256 MB x 4)
• ATI Technologies RAGE 128 Pro 32 MB (I think it is Xpert 2000 Pro.)

If you are into PC mainboards, perhaps ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 mainboard was probably one of the most exotic mainboard to ever exist. It comes with native Gen 1 PCIe x16 and AGP 8X slots (Note: A real AGP slot, not those “fake” AGP slots hooking up AGP cards to the South Bridge’s PCI bus.) It even comes with a AM2CPU upgrade card slot. What happens is that if I put the computer into standby and then resume it, the keyboard connected to it will respond for a few seconds (i.e., Num Lock or Caps Lock toggles), but it will soon freeze completely.

I also have another computer to mainly to work with RAGE 128.

• Intel Celeron 2.0A GHz
• SOYO Computer P4S Dragon Ultra
• 1 GB DDR266 DDR SDRAM (512 MB x 2)
• ATI Technologies RAGE 128 Pro 32 MB (I think it is Xpert 2000.)

For this board, it comes with a Universal AGP Pro slot, hence, I can use it with RAGE 128 (RAGE 128 does not support AGP 1.5 V signaling). Intel did not make chipsets that supported AGP 3.3 V signaling cards for their Pentium 4 chipsets (i.e., Intel 845 and 850), but SiS and VIA Technologies did. Furthermore, this mainboard supports ACPI S3 State, and it is actually pretty rare to find a mainboard that has a Universal AGP slot that happens to support ACPI S3 State. Anyway, with this mainboard, when I resume the computer from standby, the computer beeps and keyboard does not respond at all. Nothing is displayed on the screen.

Going back to the ASRock 939DUAL-SATA2 mainboard based computer, when it comes out of standby, if I frantically try to transition to VT (Virtual Terminal) and back to XFCE desktop, it is able to display “something.” The “something” here is a totally distorted display. Based on my experience of fixing most OpenChrome standby resume issues, I will assume that r128 DDX is not reinitializing all necessary registers for a proper operation.

Typically in this type of a situation, comparing the register values for before and after standby allows me to figure out which registers are causing display issue. But before I can do that, I will need to figure out how to regain control of the computer after I resume from standby.