Bounty for better Radeon Mediator drivers

[JohnFante]

Compared to the Voodoo drivers the Radeon drivers for OS.39 suck - to put it bluntly. They lack speed and there is no Warp3D support.

On OS4.1 Classic it is the other way around. The Voodoo drivers are slow and Warp3D support is not good (I can for instance not run Quake2 on my Voodoo 5 in OS4.1 Classic).

I am considering setting up a bounty to collect enough money to get Elbox to develop and release better Radeon drivers with Warp3D support. And to get the drivers open sourced :-)

I have not contacted Elbox yet to see if this is a possibility.

Before I do I just wanted to test if anybody here would be interesting in supporting such a bounty. If so it would be great. If not - no problem :-).

I know Elbox should be doing this themselves but sometimes things needs a little lubrication .... ;-)

[JohnFante]

You might want to get in touch with Ratte as he was working on a new 68k Radeon driver in the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWax2_r0cDg

As far as I know Ratte was stopped due to some copyright discussion with Elbox. :-(

Good idea ! And think about asking a pci.library 68k romable...

Great idea. I will put that on the todo-ist!

[JohnFante]

elbox has not developed warp3d drivers neither for radeon nor for voodoo, so they cannot do anything about it, no matter bounty or not. the w3d drivers supplied for mediator  were developed by hyperion, paid and comissioned by elbox as far as ive been told by them. as it has been stated, hyperion has no interest developing anything for amiga (68k) anymore, so i guess the case is lost.

Maybe they could be convinced to opensource Warp3D then. That is also the only solution that has any kind of an future.

Just trying to sense the mood - and find a way :-)

[JohnFante]

I *THINK* I have them...... Not sure and I just moved, so my server's not setup yet. I'll check and see if I have them still. I haven't used Amithlon in a while.

If you have them it would be great. :-)

Regarding the bounty I will send Elbox a mail and see how they react.

A first step would be to get better OS3.9 Radeon drivers. Warp3D/Wazp3D support for Radeon the next step.

[JohnFante]

Hello

You wrote
"for OS.39 suck They lack speed and there is no Warp3D support.
On OS4.1 Classic it is the other way around. The Voodoo drivers are slow and Warp3D support is not good"

Excuse my ignorance but why does the old  (good) 3.9 driver dont works on os4.1 ?
(After all they are both AmigaOS .library (ies) )
Is it because the 3.9 one is 68k and the 4.1 ppc ?

In OS4.1 all graphicsdrivers etc. are PPC native. I have not tried to use the OS3.9 version of the Voodoo drivers. I will give that a go - but I do not have high expectations. I have used old 3.9 drivers with my Tocatta sound drivers but the result was not very effective (high CPU load).

Or perhaps because 3.9 driver is Warp3D v4 and os4.1 is v5 ?
I mean does old 68k progs (that still use v4) works well on os4.1 with the old driver ? and only
new progs (that use v5) dont works  ?

I have not really tested that.

The way is :
compile Mesa for Aros 68k : first as software
then make (hardware) gallium  works with  it on Aros 68k (pci stuff...)
Recompile Wazp3D-Aros (that already include an OpenGL renderer) on Aros 68k
 
Alain Thellier

Are you the man for that project Alain? :-)

[JohnFante]

Ok, guys. Lets keep this cool. :-)

I asked - in the 1. post. - if there was any interest in a bounty for better Radeon (with Warp3D) drivers for OS3.9.

I can now conclude that there is very little interest, and that there is substantial problems in getting Elbox and Hyperion to play ball.

Instead people point to Aros for 68K as a possible solution for better Radeon support.

Lets focus the discussion on how this could be done.

wawrzon describes the status to be:

Compile Mesa for Aros 68k: first as software done, but not working correctly yet. Its the same on other v1 platforms. have bothered deadwood about a fix without result

Make (hardware) gallium works with it on Aros 68k (pci stuff...): Partly done, pci half implemented, pending since long even though sonic has promised to look into it. apparently the interrupts are still missing.

Recompile Wazp3D-Aros (that already include an OpenGL renderer) on Aros 68k: It compiles for 68k. Alas it doesnt work, crashes afair. may that be the reason why aros wazp3d is much bigger than your genuine 68k compile?

Is this correct?