| From: | Matthew Allatt |
| Date: | 15 Aug 2001 at 23:03:55 |
| Subject: | Re: Mediator Drivers (was Re: 40 Years. Lord HawHaw-Guy Fox-Lundy) |
Hello Alan
On 15-Aug-01, you wrote:
> ummm, since the way you access PCI is going to be roughly the same and
> since the cards are the same...and get accessed via PCI the same, then
> I'd pretty much expect a lot of the code to 'look' the same
> (how do they know without doing some reverse-engineering themselves?)
"Look" the same, yes, but Elbox say that a large chunk of code matches
exactly to what they've written. If the two were written completely from
scratch, you'd expect a whole heap of differences due to programming
styles, compilers/assemblers, etc.
>
> ..and anyway, how can they complain about this issue after what they did
> with the P96 issue?
See an earlier reply. I made on this list (I hope you haven't deleted it!)
>
> apart from the fact that its very very difficult to get any access to
> other gfx cards (and noone seems to want things like hardware PCI modems)
> the range/type of PCI cards that we can get drivers for is pretty limited
>
I agree that getting access to other gfx card information is difficult.
Hopefully Elbox, Matay, and DCE can get access to developer's information
from Matrox, as part of their agreement with Amiga. As for the range of
cards that we can get driver for, I've got serial and parallel port
information. I'd expect there to be information about the USB cards, and
possibly firewire. I wouldn't be surprised if there is SCSI information out
there. Creative have got a web site for people wanting to build
SoundBlaster drivers for Linux - this can be adapted. In fact, I'd expect
that if there's a linux driver (or BSD, QNX, etc) which has source code
available, then writing a version for the PCI board of your choice will be
possible. As things stand, Elbox have got their SoundBlaster and TV card
drivers ready (don't know what card they're writing for), and will be
released with the Warp3D drivers. I don't know what Matay and/or DCE, have
got in the pipeline.
Elbox did once make the point that ideally, they *would* have competitors,
but they would all produce drivers for different bits of hardware. Then
what could happen is a "Well do a version of our driver for A for you, if
you do a version of your driver B for us". This would be most beneficial to
the user in terms of choice. As things stand, there are four slots in a
Mediator, and only two types of useful hardware.
I may decide to port my serial drivers to the Prometheus. Matay have made
their SDK freely available, so I don't expect it to be too difficult.
>
Regards
Matthew.
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