Re: [Bochs-developers] Is it a bird ? Is it a plane ? No... it's Super... VGA.

[<os...@no...>]

On Wed, 5 Feb 2003 16:29:01 -0500, "Eric Northup"
<dig...@di...> said:
> On Wednesday 05 February 2003 03:29 pm, Olivier Reubens wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > More news on the SVGA front.
> >
> > I have used some of the 'leverage' I have over Matrox (because of the
> > relations between the company I work for and Matrox) in order to get a
> > green light on emulating a Matrox VGA inside Bochs as a means of
> > getting higher resolutions, more colordepth, acceleration etc...
> >
> > The answer was more or less along the lines of:
> > "Matrox can not support or allow information under NDA to be used in
> > the development of 'Matrox emulation'."
> > The text goes on a bit telling that they are concerned that any such
> > undertaking would result in people that have not bought a Matrox VGA
> > product to download Matrox developped add-on software from the matrox
> > site, which is again a violation of the user license for said
> > software.
> > In many ways, I can understand their views in this matter.  The same
> > problem would manifest itself for any other SVGA card we intend to
> > 'clone' through software means.
> 
> I think this is a significant reason to avoid emulating Matrox hardware
> -- the 
> advantage of emulating real hardware is that you can use the drivers.  
> Except, Matrox owns the copyright on the drivers, so we can't just use
> the 
> drivers (or even tell users to get the drivers).  Perhaps other hardware 
> vendors would be more supportive (or at least neutral), but I see no
> reason 
> to act against their wishes.

ATI tends to be fairly 'open' when it comes to handing out specs for
people to code drivers with. nVidia isn't, and can't because they have
some much 3rd party stuff that they use in their cards.

> 
> > Although I personally don't see any problem with designing our own
> > SVGA spec, and even writing the necessary code for it. I have no idea
> > how to deal with making drivers for OSes like Windows, Linux,...
> > Maybe some of you have more experience with that.

Ever tried coding a driver for a SVGA card? It's not fun. And adding yet
another SVGA spec is far from what needs to be done. Unless everyone
wants to help code drivers for it for every little OS out there.

> 
> I believe the SciTech SNAP toolkit (see 
> http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/embedded/sdk_home.html ) should make 
> writing drivers much simpler.  Also, since we are designing the
> "hardware", 
> we can make the interface simple to program.
> 

I'd be all for SNAP if it supported Windows as it wouldn't be *too* hard
for us hobby OS devers to emulate SNAP in our OSes. Currently, SNAP just
supports OS/2, QNX, QT(I'm assuming this would include KDE), and DOS.

osmaker

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