(Quietly,,now that Slayer is asleep....)
Two sections of Rogues post hit me where I live.
Quote:
My original idea was to work on the RadeonHD 45xx, which is covered to
a certain extend by the documentation. The Evergreen series isn't.
It turned out that a lot of things are quite different..........
Evergreen is a different beast.
Another issue is timing. Different setups, depending on the maker or the
BIOS revision of the card, make life quite a bit more difficult. And the
codebase is huge. Just to give you an idea, the function that generates
the pixel shader from the Env Combiners is almost twice the size as the
entire compositing code in the RadeonHD driver.
Now I have been around awhile and tinkering with hardware and the software
that makes it work is a huge part of my hobby. (NO! I'm not a programmer.)
One of the reasons I like Amiga is hardware stability, and when you spend
enough time poking around in there you find things that are undocumented
or perhaps you question why the software accesses a portion of the hardware
one way when clearly another way would be more efficient, or simpler, or
more suitable for the job at hand, and sometimes you find something that
is just plain wrong. Little things,,, that can make a big difference.
This was meaningful to me on the classics and in the early days of hobby
computing, but with ever changing hardware the search for a 'Golden Key'
to unlock various aspects of some function has become pretty meaningless,
because when found, you realize that too many have upgraded to new locks
and your key is useless.
I'm not bitching about what most will consider progress, just lamenting
about one aspect of 'When computing was FUN' being crushed under the hard
wheels of that progress.
Ah well, tomorrow is another day.