Re: [MiNT] VDI? (was Re: an urgent GEM question :-)

["Johan Klockars" <johan@klockars.net>]

> One would think they could at least release some documentation about
> creating custom drivers for it.

Actually, as I mentioned earlier, there's not really much point in
doing that (for displays, at least), since you can just use NVDI on
top of another VDI that knows about your hardware.
That works even with the normal Atari VDI, which can easily be seen by
disabling the NVDI drivers.

You do lose some of the NVDI functionality (as an example, I seem to
recall that drawing text on a coloured background didn't work, for
some odd reason (but then, I doubt anyone has ever used that
functionality)), but for the most part it works just fine.

> But on the other hand when I bought the Hades you had to buy a special Rage
> Pro version of nvdi. Not sure if that was some scam, just nvdi with
> different drvV*.sys files or if in fact NVDI is not as modular as one
> assumes. That always made we wonder.

I'm pretty sure it was "just" a matter of different drv* files, but
that's actually quite a significant "just". Doing a proper hardware
accelerated driver is not a simple matter (I did write one for the ATI
Rage, predecessor of said Rage Pro), and the market is quite small,
for obvious reasons.

/Johan