Re: ATI Drivers... do it yourself?

FROM : Michael B. Johnson
DATE : Sun Jan 13 22:26:00 2002

Hmm.

For me, I guess, it would be a question of how much is your time worth? 
Do you really need OpenGL or is this just for fun?  Given what I know of
Apple's work on their OpenGL drivers, your hourly rate's gonna have to
be pretty darn cheap if you expect to write something worthwhile to beat
out the $1000 you'd have to spend (that Lombard should be worth several
$100 on the used market) to beat the iBook you  can pick up that's got
better graphics (and supported, even!) and a faster processor (and
built-in FireWire - right there, I'd throw my old PowerBook out - oh
wait - I did!).

How can this possibly be worth your time?

But hey, don't listen to me.  I love it when people pull stuff like this
off.  I'm just getting too old to help...


On Sunday, January 13, 2002, at 10:06 PM, The Amazing Llama wrote:

> I've got a Lombard on my lap.
>
> It's a great little machine most of the time.
>
> But it's a cripple. You see, it's got an ATI Rage Pro LT for its
> graphics card. And OS X doesn't like that. So it might as well have a
> hamster for it's graphics card.
>
> How feasible is it to write a driver for the ATI Rage Pro LT? How much
> work is there to be done? How much documentation is there to work with?
> How many man-hours would need to be used? What skills would need to be
> used? How many people are interested in helping? How portable would the
> code be to the other ATI chips that are sitting there acting like
> hamsters?
>
> Any thoughts would be appreciated. Any people interesting in perhaps
> helping (if it's at all possible) would be more so.
>
>                 -The Amazing Llama <tallama at mac dot com>
> "Life is like an exploded clown. It's really funny until you figure out
> what just happened."
>
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-->  Michael B. Johnson, Ph.D. -- <email_removed>
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