Re: Alltech Electronics-- full-speed accel?

[nathan@visi.com (Nathan Mates)]

In article <34EC0055.87805F07@swbell.net>,
Rubywand  <rubywand@swbell.net> wrote:
>     PC is not, however, "where the Apple IIs were 10 years ago" in one
>important area: there is no such thing as a 'standard PC'. Game
>developers must deal with competing graphics application interfaces,

   DOS: VESA 2.0. Win95, 2D: DirectX. Win95, 3D (slow but compatible
with everything): Direct3D. Win95, 3D (faster) Glide. Professional 3D:
Open GL. It isn't hard to pick, really. Took us, oh, about 30 seconds.
Took longer to pick the 3D graphics libs for a recent Playstation
title, interestingly enough.

>     No PC user has anything like the hardware and system documentation
>available to, even, GS users. 

   You must not be looking very hard at all. Drop by the local decent
bookstore and find a 1000 page tome about the guts of a PC in a hurry.
Harder to find GS books new now. Also, if you got out of that Windoze
world, you could find a few free unix variants with FAR more
documentation and support than the GS has.

   To rehash a recent topic, I'd like FST source for the
GS. Commented. Heck, I'd like source for all the toolsets on the GS to
fix some lurking bugs. While you're stalling, I'll turn to my linux
box at home and peruse the MS-DOS "FST" support in
/usr/src/linux/fs/msdos/ Or the HFS FST. Heck, could write a FST in
the time it'd take to get anything out of Macintosh, Inc. 

   I have CDs with the full source code to just about everything I'm
running (except Netscrape, but that can change shortly) under
linux. Over the weekend, a question arose whether the NE2000-clone
ethernet boards used DMA. Quick check at source, yes. I can change any
thing I want, fix any bugs I find *in the source* (no more patching
binaries on disk) rebuild the system exactly as I want. Can you say
the same about any of the commercial OSs or even GS/OS?

   The real power users these days don't necessarily go with the crud
espoused by the big commercial OS developers. There's a LOT more real
development and and cluefulness going on around the edges, as usual.
It's purely personal choice to go with the prepackaged point-and-drool
stuff, or if you want to really learn.

Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates http://www.visi.com/~nathan/      <*>
# What are the facts? Again and again and again-- what are the _facts_?
# Shun wishful thinking, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors
# think-- what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? -R.A. Heinlein