OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware

SNAP Driver Source

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Dan Eicher:
 ** This question is not meant in a negative way towards Arca Noae **

I noticed this article:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-licenses-snap-graphics-os2-code/
 from 2015

It do not remember seeing, a lot of use of this source code to expand the drivers to newer chips sets, instead more of a focus on vesa as a write once, run anywhere solution. 

Just curious as to what happened/how that works, as I remember the early days of graphics chips having 100's of pages of manual explaining how to program them, then came CGA/Hercules - again with lots of, even bigger manuals explaining how to program them, then EGA - with even bigger books, then finally, I don't own a copy, but one really thick book on programming the 'VGA' chip.

Now, I don't know how programmers learn about the capabilities of various graphics chips, which continue to develop at a breakneck pace, both Nvidia, Intel and AMD.

Dave Yeo:
Back in the day, Scitech was on fairly good terms with the various graphic chip manufacturers, and there were a lot more of them and they supported an accelerated driver that supported most all chips. This was in the 2D world and I think there was some limited support for 3D at the end. They basically stopped development about the time of PCIx with a few cards supported, notably ATI Radeon X800/X850 series, also NVIDIA GeForce 6600, actually I had a 6700 that worked with the experimental setting. Also the Thinkpad T42/43's chip was fully supported, I think IBM paid them. Dariusz for example uses an X850 IIRC and has a dual monitor setup.
At one point they were going to GPL the source, only happened with the SDK and eventually Arca Noae bought the rights. They're planning on extending it to support at least recent Intel chips. No idea how that is going.
Currently the VBE driver is the only one that generally works unless you have an old ATI PCIx card. You can easily switch to it if you want to test it. Don't even have to switch to VGA first anymore as both SNAP and Panorama are based on IBM's gengradd driver. It is on your ISO, see the readme. If you were using your T43, it would give much better performance.

Roderick Klein:

--- Quote from: Dan Eicher on August 13, 2025, 01:45:03 am --- ** This question is not meant in a negative way towards Arca Noae **

I noticed this article:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-licenses-snap-graphics-os2-code/
 from 2015

It do not remember seeing, a lot of use of this source code to expand the drivers to newer chips sets, instead more of a focus on vesa as a write once, run anywhere solution. 

Just curious as to what happened/how that works, as I remember the early days of graphics chips having 100's of pages of manual explaining how to program them, then came CGA/Hercules - again with lots of, even bigger manuals explaining how to program them, then EGA - with even bigger books, then finally, I don't own a copy, but one really thick book on programming the 'VGA' chip.

Now, I don't know how programmers learn about the capabilities of various graphics chips, which continue to develop at a breakneck pace, both Nvidia, Intel and AMD.

--- End quote ---

From what I understand its very simple. Simply a lack of human resources.

Current chipsets no longer really comply with well a standard. You have UEFI GOP but this is effectively a frame buffer address to write to.

If you want to know how chipsets work in native mode you need to read Linux/FreeBSD code or Spec sheets. Its all extremely time consuming.
And then you have one chipset! In daily live the return on investment for SNAP on modern hardware, you will most likely not even notice it really that you are running Panorama.
Primary interests to have SNAP: Change output port on a laptop to HDMI for example or to have 2 screens connected.

Other then that I am afraid SNAP is currently frozen in time.

Roderick Klein

Dariusz Piatkowski:

--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on August 13, 2025, 02:29:52 am ---...Dariusz for example uses an X850 IIRC and has a dual monitor setup...
--- End quote ---

For what it's worth, I cannot even imagine a Desktop environment with a single display anymore. The fact that I can enjoy such a hardware setup on our OS/2 platform is THE reason why I will continue to use SNAP.


--- Quote from: Dave Yeo on August 13, 2025, 02:29:52 am ---...At one point they were going to GPL the source, only happened with the SDK and eventually Arca Noae bought the rights. They're planning on extending it to support at least recent Intel chips. No idea how that is going...
--- End quote ---

So back in Jan_2016 I reached out to Lewis (AN) volunteering to help with the updates to the SNAP solution. My contribution would have been a tiny little thing, however having successfully used the previously available SDK and written some ATI X850 specific utils (such as GPU engine and memory speed adjusters) I thought I could at least help up with the mundane utils side of things.

Lewis explained some of the plans they had at that time, Steve Levine was going to lead that work, which over time transitioned to David A for basically caretaker type of a thing. Point being: I am not aware of ANY new capabilities having been added to the SNAP drivers since, short of a single SMP hang related fix (I believe).

I wish the case was different and perhaps part of my frustration stems from the fact that we could have done something, even the little things to continue to keep this thing afloat and heck, maybe even expanded by a tiny little amount to the more upgraded chipsets that still largely followed the same proven architectures of past releases.

Dariusz Piatkowski:
Hi Dan!


--- Quote from: Dan Eicher on August 13, 2025, 01:45:03 am ---I noticed this article:
https://www.arcanoae.com/arca-noae-licenses-snap-graphics-os2-code/
 from 2015

It do not remember seeing, a lot of use of this source code to expand the drivers to newer chips sets, instead more of a focus on vesa as a write once, run anywhere solution...
--- End quote ---

If you want the latest publicly available ScitTech SDK let me know and I can toss that up on my webserver. This is NOT the current AN owned SDK/source.

BTW: it is the same thing you can stil d/l from here => http://web.archive.org/web/20080907115037/http://scitechsoft.com/ftp/devel/full_depot_r23.zip

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