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I don't think there is much chance that OpenWatcom will die out as Scitech depends on it for their graphic drivers.
Scitech has a pretty good business supplying video drivers for older OSes. At that I don't know if you remember back in the DOS days when you often needed a VESA driver to play games Display Doctor was considered the best. See http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/product_downlo ad.html for some of their products.
Watcom at one time was considered the best compiler for gaming due to its speed and being cross platform. All the old DOS games that used dos4gw were compiled with Watcom with DOOM being perhaps the most famous. DOOM ran pretty good on a 33Mhz 386.
Also here on OS/2 the GCC porter is now using wlink to link OMF object files and soon the debugger and profiler will also be working
Anyways it shouldn't be too hard to have your program compiling with Watcom and GCC. I use several libraries that have been compiled by their porter with Open Watcom eg Cairo and SDL and with one or two header ifdefs they compile fine under GCC as well. And I routinely link Watcom and GCC with the biggest program being Mozilla apps.
Anyways be good if you can leave the wmakefiles working and just add the gmakefiles or go with the auto tools

I had one of those Diamond Stealth 64 video cards. ;) It used a S3 968 chipset. Does anyone remember using VESA? SciTech Display Doctor? :) I remember having to use this utility for games and demos. Oy!

http://www.scitechsoft.com/products/ent/gld_home.p hp

"SciTech GLDirect is the utility package for Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP that combines the power of the OpenGL API with the wide availability of Direct3D hardware drivers. It accomplishes this by enabling OpenGL based games and applications to access 3D hardware acceleration through the Direct3D drivers provided by your graphics hardware manufacturer. The OpenGL API is the cross-platform, high performance standard for 3D graphics applications. "

It actually runs faster than own OpenGL drivers on some chipsets.

Yes, an openGL-Directx wrapper and if you are old timer, you know what Scitech is, in terms of software quality and impact on open standards.

Or how-about SciTech SNAP Graphics [drivers] for Linux

Volesoft tole me about 'em, see. . .

A lot of information about OS/2's USB Support can be found on the web, and as others have said a lot of video support is being provided by Scitech. Compare the numbers between the OS/2 and Linux versions. :-)

Don't know about wireless networking, but some info can be found here.

USB is definitely supported.

It supports current video through a unified graphics driver coded by SciTech Software. This replaced the GRADD drivers IBM was coding "back in the day." Its basically an OS/2 version of their SNAP graphics.

As for the other stuff, I am not entirely sure. I am pretty confident, though, that it has some wireless support provided through the more recent service paks.

Would be software that would work on all operating systems without having to have source code and compiling.

Would be nice if there were one standard for GUI and software interoperability for all operating systems.

You could then use your favorite software on any new operating system. Makes the move easier.

Emulators and java just don't do it for me.

Why isn't something like this possible. Instead of having to rewrite software , have a another program that can match hooks into a new operatin system. Kind of like a plug and play software .

Scitech Snap plug and play. Build one driver that works on all operating systems.

Got graphics cart performance or support problems, well you should be using SNAP....

startup problems, well used a desent SysVInit replecement that runs init's in parralle instead of serial.

Want to run windows games, well WineX (Cedera) runns shit loads, and out of the last 4 games I brought 2 had native Linux support 1 had Mac support (and I didn't check the box before hand).

There are commercial graphics accelerators for Windows that work very well -- commercially developped PCI and AGP video drivers that are more well-written than the stock ones from the manufacturer. See SciTech for more info ... and no, I don't work for them :)

PS, they do the same thing for Linux XFree86 drivers as well.

The Watcom compiler was a very popular DOS C/C++ compiler. Combined with DOS4GW from Tenberry (formerly Rational Systems), it was used to create many DOS games such as Doom. Traditional DOS compilers were only 16-bit tools whereas Watcom was 32-bit

SciTech scooped up Watcom's goods. They're also behind MGL, wxWindows, SNAP for Linux, Display Doctor, and GLDirect.

The Watcom compiler was a very popular DOS C/C++ compiler. Combined with DOS4GW from Tenberry (formerly Rational Systems), it was used to create many DOS games such as Doom. Traditional DOS compilers were only 16-bit tools whereas Watcom was 32-bit

SciTech scooped up Watcom's goods. They're also behind MGL, wxWindows, SNAP for Linux, Display Doctor, and GLDirect.

The Watcom compiler was a very popular DOS C/C++ compiler. Combined with DOS4GW from Tenberry (formerly Rational Systems), it was used to create many DOS games such as Doom. Traditional DOS compilers were only 16-bit tools whereas Watcom was 32-bit

SciTech scooped up Watcom's goods. They're also behind MGL, wxWindows, SNAP for Linux, Display Doctor, and GLDirect.

What I'm wondering is does this notebook come with the appropriate drivers to interpret the standard DirectX calls (like the above programs) and display any game in stereo or does the game have to be specifically written for it?

With the new X composition extention, all kdrive/xserver needs now is drivers. Snap snap is the solution. Without drivers you cant use the new x server, the new x server with a composite manager using openGL on paper is even better than what OSX offers. We need driver support.

Actually I would say they are taking a page from SciTech on this one. Take a look at the SciTech SNAP White paper which outlines a common abstraction layer by which all hardware can be completely isolated from the surrounding OS environment.... SciTech today uses this in relation to graphics drivers but the SDK alludes to much more.

Actually I would say they are taking a page from SciTech on this one. Take a look at the SciTech SNAP White paper which outlines a common abstraction layer by which all hardware can be completely isolated from the surrounding OS environment.... SciTech today uses this in relation to graphics drivers but the SDK alludes to much more.

SciTech provides commercial video drivers for linux. Has any one tried them? How do they compare to the open source or vendor supplied drivers?

SciTech provides commercial video drivers for linux. Has any one tried them? How do they compare to the open source or vendor supplied drivers?

No nvidia or SiS chipset support yet

I just realized that this might bring back the bread and butter of companies like SciTech Software (actually, has there been anyone else?) which sell products that provide a layer between Direct3D and OpenGL.

I just realized that this might bring back the bread and butter of companies like SciTech Software (actually, has there been anyone else?) which sell products that provide a layer between Direct3D and OpenGL.

1. Which operating systems the open sourced version at Sourceforge supports as of now?

Stephane Denis: Actually, the sources are designed for Win32 but they will be compatible for Linux and MacOS soon.
The ENSEIRB (a french engineer school in Bordeaux) are currently porting it for Linux and will probably speed up a lot the developement of the interface.

2. If the wrapper only supports Windows and BeOS, how easy/difficult a port to Linux or MacOS would be?

Stephane Denis: Personally, I continue the win32 emulation/wrapper to validate the wrapper compatibility and then I will do the MacOS version. For Linux, there is already a crew on it working. For the BeOS version, well I probably adapt it later.

A test D3D-2-GL program loading under WindowsXP. Click for larger version.

3. How far down the line the wrapper is? What has to be done yet?

Stephane Denis: Actually the Direct3d 8.0 part (only immediate mode) seems to works more or less, but not sufficiently enough to support really complex programs for the moment. But I expect that more people will look on other parts too, like DirectInput and DirectSound (since they are completly separated modules).

4. How fast/slow the implementation is when compared to a "native" GL app?

Stephane Denis: The speed or efficiency of the wrapper depends mainly of the OpenGL extensions supported. Since most of the time is consumed on rendering and not on API calls, this should be as fast as the original Direct3D code.

But you know, the goal is to get the DirectX API available on non-Win32 platform in order developers be able to create or port actual Direct3D 8 code. For Win32, some video cards like 3DLabs Wildcat or professional SGI video cards do not support Direct3d or Directdraw at all, but they have an excellent Opengl implementation. So the wrapper would be especially useful for theses adapters. A solution already exists, but we want to add Direct3D8 support.

I truly hope that more developers will join this interesting project now so we get things going in a faster pace.

A Direct3D application running in GL mode with the help of the wrapper.

In short, there are plenty of OS/2 users today, although most of them are in Europe. In fact, if Slashdot weren't so US-centric, then the editors would have realized how stupid this "Ask Slashdot" is. Why? Because the biggest OS/2 conference of the year is being held right now in Belgium! The 2nd-biggest was held last month in Toronto.

There are actually two versions of OS/2 available today: the Convenience Pack (CP) from IBM and eComStation from Serenity Systems. eCS is a VAR version of the CP, meaning that it's basically the CP code base, with an enhanced installer, lots of third-party apps built-in, and a bunch of other enhancements. I'm running it right now on a dual Athlon system - the Tyan Tiger MP works great for OS/2, and yes, OS/2 does support SMP systems.

There have been lots of advances in OS/2 over the past year. Project Odin is serious competition for Wine, and can run many Windows apps that Wine doesn't. Plus, Virtual PC for OS/2 was just announced and will be available in a couple months.

Device support has also improved significantly. The only major category of devices that isn't supported is Firewire, but everything else is very thoroughly supported. In fact, video support is phenomenal, thanks to the SciTech Display Doctor video drivers. With these drivers, OS/2 can do what Windows and Linux can't: you can change your video card without reinstalling or reconfiguring any drivers!

I could go on for hours, but I'm going to let other OS/2 users fill in the rest.

What ever happened to the VESA video card standards? Its about time we get a VESA3 out folks, as it is though, few new cards are even VESA2 complient

There already is VESA 3 VBE/AF; here's a few free VBE/AF drivers, and here are some you have to pay for.

I have had lots of luck with Display Doctor when trying to get weird graphics cards to work. You can download it from here. I think its a 30 day demo or something and its pretty cheap to buy it. I have no idea if it will work with the eMachine's chipset, but hey, worth a shot.