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OpenSNAP geplant/OpenSNAP planned

Started by Saijin_Naib, 2008.04.09, 05:12:48

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Saijin_Naib

BWAHHHHHHHHH!  ;D ;D ;D ;D

Can this be real? Will OS/2 really have hardware overlay again?!?

Yesss.

Shai

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.09, 05:12:48
BWAHHHHHHHHH!  ;D ;D ;D ;D

Can this be real? Will OS/2 really have hardware overlay again?!?

Yesss.
Wasn't that hard to get the latest SNAP legally. It is shipped with eCS and there was still the Personal Edition.
It's nice they don't just let it die quietly like so many other abandoned products - seems that they still care for OS/2.
Therefore I think it's obvious: For this to be beneficial, someone has (or better a group of people have) to maintain and enhance the driver.
btw: hardware overlays are only one feature (doesn't Panorama support this, too?). Hardware accelerated display drivers are simply faster. Also there's multihead support in SNAP - this would be especially important for guys like me who want to continue working with 2 monitors.

greetings,
Robin

Saijin_Naib

SNAP does not support my current chipset (7600GT) and as far as I know, Panorama cant do hardware overlay because its a VESA only driver, therefore, no hardware acceleration at all.

I am most excited for the hardware overlay so video playback can not eat my CPU, and I can benefit from all the post-proc features my chipset supports (hello Desktop Painter, how I have missed you!)

I also would like to be able to scroll large windows without lag and 99.9% CPU usage, more or less most of my excitement over this news :)

Also, this gives me hope for a port of OpenGL to the OS/2 platform again, something we desperately need.

magog

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.09, 09:44:05
SNAP does not support my current chipset (7600GT) and as far as I know, Panorama cant do hardware overlay because its a VESA only driver, therefore, no hardware acceleration at all.

Panorama can't do overlay and Dual/Multi-Head but it's much faster than SNAPs GenGRADD.
As nVidia hasn't started to open their specs you won't see much nVidia GeForce support in OpenSNAP I guess.

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.09, 09:44:05
I am most excited for the hardware overlay so video playback can not eat my CPU, and I can benefit from all the post-proc features my chipset supports (hello Desktop Painter, how I have missed you!)

I also would like to be able to scroll large windows without lag and 99.9% CPU usage, more or less most of my excitement over this news :)

As I said scolling without lag for unsupported cards use: Panorama

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.09, 09:44:05
Also, this gives me hope for a port of OpenGL to the OS/2 platform again, something we desperately need.
I still have the copy of the Hardware Accelerated OpenGL Toolkit here. ;)
Using this is not really legal but since it's abandonware I would actually ignore this obstacle.

For details look in this thread and this message as starting point:
http://www.os2world.com/component/option,com_smf/Itemid,63/topic,515.msg2485/#msg2485
Regards,
Juergen
*** Java Movie Database - http://www.jmdb.de/

Saijin_Naib

Hey Magog, I am using PANORAMA Vesa with Shadowbuffer on, and it still lags and eats 100% of my cpu when I scroll any window. Its readily apparent with larger things like OO.org windows or Firefox, but even extends down to small plain-text windows like MrMessage chat windows. I've discussed it with Eugene, and he is aware, and intends somewhere along the line to improve the scrolling performance of Panorama.

As for no support for my Nvidia chipset, I said that SNAP doesnt support it, but that is only the case for the OS/2 driver because they abandoned it long before the Windows driver. My card is fully supported under SNAP (windows) and works beautifully, so I assume that since it is in the SNAP codebase and functional, it would be relatively easy to take this (already established) code and work it into the OS/2 release, or am I wrong?

BigWarpGuy


Paul Smedley

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.09, 19:47:23
As for no support for my Nvidia chipset, I said that SNAP doesnt support it, but that is only the case for the OS/2 driver because they abandoned it long before the Windows driver. My card is fully supported under SNAP (windows) and works beautifully, so I assume that since it is in the SNAP codebase and functional, it would be relatively easy to take this (already established) code and work it into the OS/2 release, or am I wrong?

Well it depends what exactly they end up releasing in the opensource release.  Some of the code for particular chipsets could be covered by NDA so cannot be released under any opensource license.

Saijin_Naib

Damn :C Is there any particular factor that would determine this, or is this all an internal (to Scitech) process and we just have to stand by and see what the result is?

Even if it turns out it doesnt support my chipset, I'll still be incredibly happy to see it become a reality!

jep

Hello,

SNAP from ScitechSoft may not have support for all the latest chipset (ATI and NVidia) but contain what I would say is the more stable and well designed product.

It would be most interesting if "all" developers that write drivers for graphics card could unite and continue to improve OpenSNAP, add parts from Panorama (as I asked from the start 05...) as it does have at least some support for ATI chipset and get HW OpenGL at some point in the future. My GeCube Radeon HD 3870 does work with Panorama at least  ;D

Piggy backing on the Linux community? If we had the soources to GRADD then we'd have something to bargain with so that we could share technology between platforms. We could offer something that could be used by many, one wheel design to improve.

The Linux way: One developer, one driver, one system that it works on, develop the wheel over and over again.

//Jan-Erik

Paul Smedley

Quote from: Saijin_Naib on 2008.04.10, 06:26:24
Damn :C Is there any particular factor that would determine this, or is this all an internal (to Scitech) process and we just have to stand by and see what the result is?

Even if it turns out it doesnt support my chipset, I'll still be incredibly happy to see it become a reality!

It would depend on how Scitech obtained the information they needed to be able to support the chipset.  Some manufacturers make this publically available, others require a NDA.... IIRC in some cases, Scitech used information from opensource linux drivers also...

magog

As Steve already wrote on the normal snap os2 newsgroup, they can't release the Matrox driver.
As SciTech as been ATI's development partner, they had an NDA for the ATI driver stuff.
The question is now, can they release the ATI stuff now as AMD/ATI has opened the access to the chipset documentation?
Intel has also some open documents of their integrated graphics engine, so it might be possible to add them as well.

As SciTech had always problems with nVidia the non-team player, I would guess that they can release those drivers. The information needed came from X-driver sources as far as I know.
Then there is the old stuff, that was already part of the open SNAP DDK in April 2004 (SNAP 2.3r14).

A quick look into that package tells me the following driver where included in that release:
-3dfx (TDFX_BANSHEE, TDFX_VOODOO3, TDFX_VOODOO4, TDFX_VOODOO5)
-VESA
-IBM VGA

Some MESA-3D (v3.5) stuff is also included.
Regards,
Juergen
*** Java Movie Database - http://www.jmdb.de/

miturbide


Does Anybody know anything about this ? was any source code released ?
Martín Itúrbide
OS2World.com NewsMaster
Open Source Advocate

Skype - martiniturbide
Google Talk - martiniturbide@gmail.com

warpcafe

Heya,

did someone already mention that the scitech site no longer exists but redirects you to...
http://www.altrichmond.ca/ ?

Quote
December 2008
Alt Richmond closes acquisition of SciTech Software's SNAP technology

October 2008
Alt Richmond agrees to acquire SciTech Software's SNAP technology

I never heard of that up to now... did you?? Wondering what that means for the future of OpenSnap (if any)

Cheers,
Thomas
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy

Joachim

Quote from: warpcafe on 2009.08.28, 10:23:08
did someone already mention that the scitech site no longer exists but redirects you to...
http://www.altrichmond.ca/ ?

We're already in touch with them, don't worry.

Regards,

Joachim - Mensys BV

warpcafe

Quote from: Joachim on 2009.08.28, 15:08:57
We're already in touch with them, don't worry.

coooool. ;)
(And thanks for the info!)
"It is not worth an intelligent man's time to be in the majority.
By definition, there are already enough people to do that"
- G.H. Hardy