ATI driver status update

I've just managed to re-use the code, which is remotely common among all video drivers in AROS (well, at least the same is in nVidia.hidd). So at the moment the ATI-compatible card is searched for and, if found, the memory mappings for framebuffer and MMIO are perpared. ATI driver is currently 12KB (KiB?) long and detects all devices supported - from old Rage128 up to the newest R420 GPU's.

Well, I will have to double the driver, since the Rage128 has to be handled in different way compared to the Radeon family. I hope only that both parts will coexist somehow and share as much code as possible.

Anyway, the next status update should happen soon - and then my ATI card should already show something. Perhaps even Wanderer screen :D

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The ATI driver

Today I have started collecting the documentation and sources needed to make an ATI.hidd - video driver for all radeon cards. I hope to start developing soon (parallel with my old pending NVIDIA ethernet driver).

Most likely it will be quite similar to the nvidia.hidd - that is all bitmaps will be stored in memory of graphics card and from there blitted directly to screens. It should give nice speed boost over the x11 driver which basically uses one big framebuffer and few additional KB of video memory for cursor and line buffers used to do blits with CPU.

As a nice addon I will perhaps add finally AGP support to the pci classes - at least ability to change the agp mode.

EDIT: I've just got my ATI card. It means that the development may start even tonight :)

The very first entry

Impressing, my own blog. Let's start it :)