[gold-devel] |POLL| Which graphics card should I work on next?

[Adam Martin]

On 2005 Nov 13 , at 20:37, jbit wrote:

> Okay,
> The MGA-G400 driver is pretty much working now, and can display golem 
> stuff,
> but to avoid having all my APIs and stuff revolving round how the G400 
> works,
> I'd like to support another video card.

	Killer!

> Top of my list at the moment is the ATI Rage128, since it seems used a 
> lot
> (and I have one or two).
> But what card does everybody else think i should support? Obviously I 
> can't
> support the latest geforce/radeon, but some of the older ones are 
> possible...
> I'd like a card that available easily, and alot of people have, but it 
> also
> needs to have a pretty complete drawing engine on it, which has open 
> source
> drivers or preferably an available spec.
>
> When I have a software render engine I'll add support for the older 
> Cirrus
> Logic chips, and 'kernel based graphics'.

	I am keen on support for the older Cirrus Logic chips, and the 
ATI-Mach-64.  The reason is that I have both in hardware, and can 
readily test them with LSD at some point to verify PCI bus 
configuration, when that gets up, and it's cheap hardware.  (Remember 
that you must make LSD give you the card IO slots.)

> I'm also eager to start work on more exotic hardware, I should have a 
> wacom
> graphics tablet soon, and I'm looking at a pair of 3d shutter glasses 
> to play
> around with real depth cued GUI stuff, any other cool ideas are 
> welcome (I'm
> also looking for a cheap touch screen)

	As far as exotic hardware....  Think you could drive two monitors at 
different polarisation, and use polarised glasses to get a 3d kind of 
effect?  Or interlace polarisation?  Probably not....  I doubt you can 
control light polarisation from standard CRT's, but that idea always 
appealed to me.  Maybe B&R or G&B or some other color spectrum eye 
fooling?  (Like the old 3D movie glasses from the 1950s, as depicted in 
American cinema.)

	Also, James, please record what access you need to each individual 
card you support, and whether that card has arbitrary physical address 
write capabilities that are part of what would be exposed.  This will 
be important for the stability and security of the system.  (And don't 
lose your docs for each card.  I'll need to make the LSD PCI backends 
for them.)

--
Adam David Alan Martin

P.S.: At some point, get around to the cheap VGA graphics, as 
discussed?  Would you like 16-bit VESA-BIOS support?  I could make a 
16-bit BIOS segment for that, and get you a few modes that way....