AmigaOS 4.x to support about 180 Graphics card chips

[Hammer]

@hnl_dk

Sounds good...

[Hammer]

Well the probably biggest problem however is that
most of the gfx card drivers of SNAP for advanced
cards are probably based on object files
provided by the card manufactures and these are
only available for x86 and not ppc.

Refer to http://www.scitechsoft.com/docs/snap_ga/notoc/index.html

"SciTech SNAP drivers are source code portable between different microprocessor platforms, and the binary drivers are operating system portable within a particular microprocessor family. Hence the Intel x86 drivers can work on any 386+ CPU with any 32-bit operating system or environment supported on that CPU."

[Hammer]

ksk wrote:
G4 toasting the P4 :-o  ... 180 GFX chip drivers for AOS4 :-o  :-o  ...

That’s a bit of a generalization.

http://www.barefeats.com/p4game.html
http://www.barefeats.com/pentium4.html

(Just for reference between Pentium 4 3Ghz HT vs Athlon XP 2700+/nForce2)http://www17.tomshardware.com/graphic/20021218/vgacharts-05.html  

[Hammer]

You read that right, 2D. SNAP's vast majority of support is for 10+ year old VGA, EGA and CGA chip solution!
 

There's nothing wrong with investment protection regime.  

[Hammer]

Not saying that having support is bad, but that I am sick of people going "oooooo, 180+ chips, must be great."

What’s the other alternative?  

 It's not great, as AOS4 will never see a good portion of them. Also, too many people don't read the fine lines, nor do their research into the supported chipsets.

What kind of research are you referring to?

I happen to use SNAP in my OS/2 partition and find it very nice (better than the 16-bit OS/2 drivers for my Voodoo).
 

Good for you...

But this also brings up the second issue of AOS4 I don't like, inconsistancy. Which API will coders have to use, P96 or SNAP?
 

Asserting "inconsistency" would be subjective since you haven't seen the whole picture.

Refer to http://www.amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2003-02-00202-EN.html

Also refer to http://www.scitechsoft.com/docs/snap_ga/notoc/index.html

"SciTech SNAP drivers are source code portable between different microprocessor platforms, and the binary drivers are operating system portable within a particular microprocessor family. Hence the Intel x86 drivers can work on any 386+ CPU with any 32-bit operating system or environment supported on that CPU."