Re: [MiNT] Mesa, Glide and 3dfx for Atari clones ?

[maxilys@normandnet.fr (Remi Villatel)]

Hi Mandin Patrice, on 17 Apr 00 you said:

 MP> Here is the situation:
 MP> There are Atari clones that have PCI (and maybe AGP) buses,
 MP> so they can have 3DFX cards plugged in.
 MP> The drivers for these cards are available under Linux (and
 MP> are open sources).
 MP> So somebody could make a port of these drivers to work on
 MP> Atari clones, and we could see OpenGL accelerated games
 MP> (Quake ?).

Here is the situation on Hades (I don't know how the Milan handles the graphics 
cards):

At boot time, the TOS in the Hades tries to initialize an ET-4000 on the ISA 
bus, if none is found, it will try to find a Mach64 on the ISA bus. If these 2 
tests failed then the TOS tries to find an ET-4000 or a Mach64 on the PCI bus. 
If none of the 4 above were found the screen remains black. No video output. 
That's what is written in the docs and I know it's true because I tried to put 
an ATI Rage Pro in my Hades and all I got is a black screen.

An Hades is not a PC-clone, it has no BIOS that initialize any available 
graphic card. There is an external PCI-BIOS (whatever it is worth to) but it 
needs the TOS to be loaded from the AUTO folder. (Kind or circular, isn't it?) 
We would need something like Lilo to boot the MiNT kernel directly from the 
hard disk... And I don't know how MiNT would react without all that's in my 
AUTO folder... like 'set_mmu', for example. On the other hand, will all 
programs usually located in the AUTO folder accept to be launch from 'mint.cnf'?

 MP> I would like to make a Mesa port on Atari, the way I did it for the games.
 MP> I know that somebody already made one, but I would like something more
 MP> standard (libGL.a for Mint).

 MP> It would be nice to see fast OpenGL on Atari machines.

I agree! That's would be nice to be able to use modern (faster) graphic cards 
with hardware accelerators (2D and 3D).

The problem is that there are few Hades-es around the world (Who would write 
something for a very rare machine?) and the Milan 2 won't help us because of 
its "integrated" graphic card... except if they change their mind once again 
and decide to put a "real" graphic card in the Milan 2.

See you later,

--
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Remi Villatel
E-mail: maxilys@normandnet.fr
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