Freeing the Specs?

rhost89 asks: "I'm a hobbyist OS Developer and am appalled at the obscurity and availability of some of the specs sheets for various device groups, specifically video cards. If we want to write video drivers we are almost forced into writing for VESA or for cards that were obsolete 5 years ago, meaning high resolutions that run like a dog, or blazingly fast at 640x480 at 256 colors. Most manufactures hold on to their engineering spec sheets like pirate holds on to their gold doubloons (NVIDIA, and ATI come to mind, here). Other manufactures are quite happy to provide the specs for their devices, such as Intel and Matrox. My question is what can hobbyist OS developers do to get these coveted spec sheets. Would petitions help or would it be an exercise in futility. What else can we do to free this valuable information besides reverse engineering the manufactures binaries?" It's funny how the more things have changed over the last five years, the more things stay the same.

Comments

BeOS

[roachmotel3]

What did BeOS do? I remember that they had really good video drivers for the hardware I had at the time. If I remember right, there is a FreeBeOS project going on now, maybe you could find some resources there.

Mass protest

[Anonymous Coward]

Would petitions help or would it be an exercise in futility. What else can we do to free this valuable information besides reverse engineering the manufactures binaries?

Take a cue from the pros: organize mass protests. Make sure to spend lots of time on the costumes and effegies that you will use. Use PDAs and cell phones so that you can reroute your riot around the police. Beef up your numbers by allowing other groups to co-riot with you (anti-globalism, anti-war, save-the-whales, etc.) Form a human chain and have the women scream like murder when the cops try to pull them apart.

Remember, you need to draw attention to your cause. Only when footage of your group dressed up in silly costumes and running around screaming shows up on TV will the masses understand and respect your viewpoint on this important issue.

Reverse engineering is easier if you have source

[adb]

I haven't encountered a video card in years that didn't have a solid free 2D driver in XFree86. If you're working on one of those l33t non-Unix free OSes, you can probably get all the information you need from the X driver and (for those that have it) the Linux framebuffer driver.

The world of 3D is different, of course. nVidia cards, for example, still have binary-only 3D drivers as far as I recall. In those cases, as a practical matter, you might start by wrapping the binary-only drivers in a Linux emulation layer.

Re:Reverse engineering is easier if you have sourc

[rhost89]

OK ive been lurking thought I would explain what my project is, as it would give the readers more insight. Im building a auto pc for my car, not a l33t do nothing OS. I have no grand delusions of overthrowing MS. It is going to be hooked up to the ODBII port and display data in 3D bar/line charts (like fuel injection maps, engine load by rpm, etc) as well as a few other functions like a mp3 player and mabey video. I plan on adding modules as I go so it will be modular and upgradeable. Eventually i plan on integrating it with my PCM so i can change maps on the fly. VESA of coarse is out of the question for display. Thunking back to real mode to update the display is sooo 1995 :)

3dfx specs

[i_am_nitrogen]

3dfx opened up all their specs. If you can find a Voodoo 3 or better around somewhere, and your system will have a full height half length PCI slot available, you can use that. It was easy enough to implement a basic 2D driver for libfbx with the Voodoo 3, and there's the XFree86 source code for 3D support (why oh why are there so few comments in that code??). Finding someone who still has the specs around on their hard drive might be difficult, though. I asked nVidia who has the spec sheets, since they bought much of 3dfx's IP.. They gave me a single sentence reply: "We do not have this information." I bet a Voodoo 3 would be good enough for what you're trying to do, and a Voodoo 5 certainly should be.

If anyone has the Voodoo 3, 4, and/or 5 spec sheet PDF's around, let this guy know, and let me know too!