Motorola Q9H video strangeness

I was told by a customer that my game emulators did not display correctly on the Motorola Q9H smartphone.  I got hold of a loaner device and discovered the problem.  For some reason, the video memory is mapped in an odd way (reminiscent of the old Apple II).  This odd RAM mapping means that many games/multimedia applications will not run correctly on the Q9H.  I’ve written a workaround for my software, but the bigger question is how many devices/programs this affects.  My best guess is that this is the fault of the new TI OMAP 2420 CPU.  This chip has many 2D/3D capabilities, so it makes sense that the designers didn’t care much about how the video memory was mapped since most software would use the advanced capabilities of the chip and not write to VRAM directly.  I’m in contact with my friend at TI and will report more information about this problem as soon as I know.

Update: Sorry I haven’t updated this post, but I forgot all about it. The video strangeness is due indeed to the OMAP 2420 and will affect all devices which use it. The memory is laid out with each horizontal line having a “pitch” of 4096 (0×1000) and when you reach the 64th line, add 0×280. Here’s an example:

Suppose the starting video address is 0×07e00000

(line 0) 0×07e00000
(line 1) 0×07e01000
(line 2) 0×07e02000
…
(line 63) 0×07e3f000
(line 64) 0×07e00280
(line 65) 0×07e01280

nuff said