Would you support a new Unified Opensource RTG standart?

[kolla]

What advantages would an open source RTG standard have over what I've already got?

Open and free developer kit for developing drivers so that new graphics card solutions can be supported.

I find this poll a little confusing though, as I find that this is a topic that is only really relevant for developers, not users. Users can support it all they like, but nothing will happen without developers supporting a new standard.

[kolla]

But on the other hand, will it make sense if no user is going to actually use it?

We need both, users and developers.

Sure, but developers first

Whether users will really support it depends entirely on how well the result is, and how easy it is to test it without screwing up existing p96/cgx installations.

[kolla]

I'd support it just to piss off the P96 guy!

Let's call P97 :laughing:

[kolla]

do you have all the os docs on rtg? have you studied and programmed for  p96?

That's where all this started, if you had been paying attention.... the P96 SDK is not available, and the rightholders refuse to open it. The only way to write P96 drivers today, legally, is to through reverse engineering an existing driver.

[kolla]

I think it's unrealistic to expect someone to write drivers for all the existing amiga graphics cards.

Why would it be someone? Typically there might be someone who will write a driver for his/her card. However, without SDK there's almost a guatantee that there will be no new drivers at all - ever..

Writing graphics card drivers is quite tricky and requires special kind of skillset. There aren't many around who would be capable, not to mention willing.

And again, by not providing the SDK needed, it is almost guaranteed that noone will bother. God forbid any new people who might stumble into this freakshow of a plattform and who might be interested in writing drivers.

This would basically lead to a situation that instead of two systems that support different set of hardware we'd have three. Instead of two different systems with slightly different quirks, we'd have three systems with different quirks.

Ofcourse, but one of them at least having the advantage that it can be upgraded and fixed on - that's what this is all about.

New driver system would also mean that 3d drivers would need to be written from scratch.

No it doesnt. 3D on m68k is not that much of an issue in the first place.

I don't have an easy alternate solution to offer, unfortunately.

I just wonder what people like you will do when MorphOS eventually is in the same situation

[kolla]

Just top put things in perspective - imagine if AHI was closed up like P96 and CGX, and what that would mean.

[kolla]

But someone is going to have to write drivers for the new system that support the cards that are already supported by either P96 or CV64... No one is going to do that...

What do you know about that? As I wrote before, the typical scenario is not someone writing all the drivers to replace CGX and P96 all over, it's someone writing a driver for his/her card, and to be able to tweak and test out things with his/her own hardware. Ofcourse the best would be if one could do this using existing SDKs for CGX and P96, since they no doubt are superior to anything a new RTG would be able offer in years. However, today this is not really possible without reverse engineering and and a lot of guesswork.

[kolla]

Yes, I see most of those predate AHI being released under the (L)GPL, which was kinda the point I was trying to make

What does (L)GPL have to do with any of this?
Besides, no - it was not the point you were trying to make, I know you too well - your point was that some of those drivers would have been written anyways, because those who wrote them would happily have used a pirated SDK