OS4, SNAP drivers

[mikeymike]

Before OS4, what were these SNAP drivers being used for?  I don't know the company who writes them so I can't check out their site :-)

[alx]

don't know the company who writes them so I can't check out their site :-)

SciTech

[downix]

SNAP is not for OS4, it's for LinuxPPC at this time.  They might go to OS4 "at some point in the future" according to Mr. Hermans.

Before LinuxPPC, SNAP was found under Linux and OS/2.

[xeron]

What? I thought it was announced that there would definately be a wrapper for SNAP drivers, not that it would be out for LinuxPPC, and "maybe" OS4 later.

[xeron]

in fact, looks a little more than "might" go into OS4.

[Floid]

From what I heard, SNAP was not planned for the CSPPC release (users with legacy hardware probably have supported cards already), but was to be out for the AmigaOne version, either at launch or in a Boing Bag?

Anyhow, SciTech's made a market of selling collections of working drivers for ages now; they had their start with Display Doctor, which I believe was originally a *Windows* product.  Sure, it's not that hard to track down stable drivers for the one card in your desktop now, but imagine being an admin for a campus's worth of machines...  And at the time they got their start, a campus's worth of machines with things like those lovely old Trident cards, ATIs with bugged-up drivers, chipsets abandoned by their manufacturers, and so forth.  Wasn't a pretty era.

[bloodline]

I'm not sure of the advantage of SNAP over VESA3... since SNAP doesn't even support 3D :-/

Unless the PPC can't initilise the VESA BIOS... hmmm, maybe that's all SNAP does :-)

[xeron]

SNAP drivers offer accelerated 2D. AFAIK, VESA does not.

[Floid]

bloodline wrote:
I'm not sure of the advantage of SNAP over VESA3... since SNAP doesn't even support 3D :-/

Unless the PPC can't initilise the VESA BIOS... hmmm, maybe that's all SNAP does :-)

Not all cards/boards have VESA 3.x support in ROM, or available for flash update.  (Heck, I had fun watching Knoppix's display corrupt for bugs in a SiS-based integrated mainboard's support... Old K6-2 machine.)

SNAP opens up 2D support nearly as wide as that included out of the box with Windows.  Simple as that.  Now, supporting VESA calls back to 1.x would be almost as good (if that's even possible off x86?  I forget what the answer was there re: what the emulators in Eyetech's U-Boot or Genesi's OF can do...), but that's not going to enable basic accellerations on the old cards at all.

Now, sure, maybe you don't *need* this level of support - Apple gets on fine without it - but when you guys fry your Radeons trying to overclock, or one of your larva yanks on the monitor connection and destroys the connector, or you've got the machine apart for some reason and you step backwards and *CRACK*...

...Well, then isn't it nice to know you can pull some old card out of your junk bin, or something recent off the shelf at CompUSA, and have a good chance of it working, at least in a basic fashion?

[bloodline]

xeron wrote:
SNAP drivers offer accelerated 2D. AFAIK, VESA does not.

VESA 3 is accelerated AFAIK

[bloodline]

one of your larva yanks on the monitor connection and destroys the connector

HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAH, I've not heard that expresion before :-)

[AmigaSource]

Just in case you want to read it for yourself.  Let's just keep our fingers crossed that eveything is still moving along as planned.  It's been a few months now!  


Right from the horse's mouth (Scitechsoft)