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

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.

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!