On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 12:08:32AM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
I guess that depends on what exactly are the juicy bits, I find it suspicious that the reverse engineering/OS community have completely failed to extract any sort of 3D capability from the card whatsoever, Quite complicated things have been successfully worked out in the past. So I am guessing that there is something very weird going on with the way the driver and card interact when doing 3D.
My guess is that reverse engineering the drivers is just too hard, apparently the Linux driver is based on the Windows NT driver (as in very heavily, i did read somewhere that it even emulates parts of the Windows registry!) and I figure that people who care about the driver being free have bought an older ATI card and those that don't care just use the Nvidia driver. I could imagine that reverse engineering a driver/card to produce a driver worse than one that is already available isn't a very attractive option for most people.
Adam