As usual I have to give my 2 cents on this. :)
First off all, it is very sad to hear that the whole team has been let go
from VA Linux. I wish all of you the best luck in the future. Thanks a lot
for all the work you have put into this!
Now, I have a question ... why are the graphics companies so reluctant to
give out specs even for the old and "obsolete" hardware such as the Mach64?
I
am not talking about ATI specifically here ...although they are a very good
example. I can fully understand why professionals such as Gareth do not want
to spend their time maintaining old drivers. However, writing a driver for
the Mach64 (or improving other old drivers) is the perfect job for
volunteers, newbies and students who want to get some hands on experience
writing
drivers that will be used in the real world. Is there really so much
proprietary and secret information in the specs of old hardware that the
companies can not make it publicly available? Just from what I have read on
this list it seems that a lot of promising new volunteer developers come and
go because they get frustrated that they can not easily obtain
documentation. If ATI and other companies made the documentation for their
older hardware public (or maybe even released the source code for the
Windows drivers) I could see the DRI project really living up again!
Now, a lot of people also say that this doesn't really matter since the
hardware is so old that no one needs 3D acceleration for it anyway. I don't
think that is true at all. A lot of people still use older notebooks with
Mach64 chips and pretty much all of our Dell servers/workstations at work
have Mach64's in them. While these older notebooks may not be able to play
the latest and greatest games I would still greatly appreciate the ability
to fire up an OpenGL sidescroller or shoot'em up while I'm on the road. And
even those "simple" games will not run at satisfactory speeds using software
rendering. It would also be sweet if I could use my workstation at work to
play some Unreal or Q3 over the LAN ... I am pretty sure that the Rage Pro's
could support these games at decent speeds ... right? And using a PowerEdge
4400 for a LAN party would be pretty damn cool too. :)
Not to mention the "not-so-old" hardware like Rage128s. I have a 32mb Rage
Fury Pro in my home machine and I am not planning on upgrading anytime soon.
Mostly because I don't play that many games and also because this card
performs well enough for me ... but if someone continued to improve the
driver I could probably keep using it for even longer with some newer games.
If the companies could get volunteers to maintain the old drivers for them
that could even save them some money ... and it would be almost like free
advertising. I certainly would buy my next graphics card from a company that
supports volunteer development instead of going to a competitor that keeps
all their information secret!
So, can somebody answer my question ... what is so secret about the specs
for old hardware??? And why would companies _not_ want volunteers to work on
old drivers?
- Frank
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