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[News] Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4ANN.lu
Posted on 16-Jan-2002 16:48 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä61 comments
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Bill Toner talked about issues regarding the support of ATI Radeon chipsets in AmigaOS4 on the AmigaOne mailing list. Read the message below.

ATI Radeon support will happen, but I'm not sure when it will be completed. Permedia 3 support has been announced as well. This will initially support the original Radeon chipset, RV100 that has been around a while, and will at some point support the newer Radeon chip, the RV200 as well. My business partner and I are the "other party" Hyperion mentioned in their OS4/Radeon/Permedia3 announcement a while ago for the Radeon part. We hope to have something usable soon, but it certainly won't be done by their announced OS4 release date in Feb. But it will most definitely be done for OS4.x, and I have had an AmigaOne on preorder as well for some time... Prometheus will be the first bridge supported, as that'a all that I have right now. We do intend to support Mediator if we can, but Elbox's sense of PR has kept me disgruntled with them and I have not signed/returned their NDA form yet, so we can't yet support Mediator but I'll do it soon, plus Mediator 1200 models at least will be more work due to their small memory window access point. Especially since some boards apparently work with 8MB window setting and some other older boards only work well with the smaller 4MB window setting. Elbox PR said something about the trashed graphics in 8MB mode were some hardware dongle feature or something like that, but I find that hard to swallow... But we'll work it out at some point and find a Mediator owner to test it with. When I originally contacted DCE about supporting Grex a year ago or so now, I still have yet to receive any response at all from them. So I'm not sure they wanted Radeon drivers for their card which I thought was odd, but oh well. Perhaps I should try them again... AmigaOne will also be supported via the AGP slot. Regarding Pegasos, my NDA with ATI does not have "Morphos" written on it anywhere. But I got this NDA back before I knew of the Pegasos project at all and I run AmigaOS on my Amigas, not anything else, so Morphos at the time didn't have much meaning to my machines as none of them even have PPC cards. AmigaOS 3.9 and AmigaOne/AmigaOS 4.x will be what we target while we consider if the effort in renegotiating the NDA is worth the returns from MorphOS users.

But please, don't run out and buy a Radeon card just yet. We may dongle-ize our drivers to some tag we set in Radeon cards we sell, in an effort to reduce P96 piracy. Elbox screwed the P96 guys, as not all Mediator users will pay the P96 "shareware fee" Elbox talked about. We are going to include fully licensed P96 (and possibly warp3d if they don't have licenses already with all PCI bridge companies) with Radeons we sell to guarantee both P96 team, warp3d team,  and my company get return on our work. I don't intend to trash talk anyone, but piracy is a fact of life. We intend to circumvent that a bit, in the same way that PicassoIV did. PC store-bought Radeons may not work, just a warning.

As for the porting of Mediator/Grex drivers to OS4.x, I wonder how this will be done. Surely if OS4 runs on Elbox's SharkPPC they will port Mediator drivers to that OS4 implementation, but I'm not sure they'll let their drivers work on hardware other than Mediator+SharkPPC. DCE may not have Grex drivers work under OS4 on hardware other than Grex. Hopefully they will support more bridges/motherboards, especially Elbox since they charge extra for their driver CDROM for Mediator anyway. We'll have to wait and see, but I'm not getting any hopes up. We'll be supporting any PCI bridge we can with Radeon drivers.

--
Bill Toner
Forefront Technologies, Inc. (previously Progressive Data Systems)
bill@prodatasys.com

List of all comments to this article
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Comment 1Phill16-Jan-2002 16:41 GMT
Comment 2Anonymous16-Jan-2002 16:47 GMT
Comment 3Andreas Wolf16-Jan-2002 16:49 GMT
Comment 4Harald Frank16-Jan-2002 17:43 GMT
Comment 5Christophe Decanini16-Jan-2002 18:09 GMT
Comment 6[JC]16-Jan-2002 19:13 GMT
Comment 7BobsonSirJonny16-Jan-2002 20:10 GMT
Comment 8Mike Veroukis16-Jan-2002 20:57 GMT
Comment 9tinman16-Jan-2002 21:05 GMT
Comment 10Anonymous16-Jan-2002 21:08 GMT
Comment 11redrumloa16-Jan-2002 21:23 GMT
Comment 12Anonymous16-Jan-2002 21:30 GMT
Comment 13[JC]16-Jan-2002 21:33 GMT
Comment 14Alcemyst16-Jan-2002 22:03 GMT
Comment 15redrumloa16-Jan-2002 22:07 GMT
Comment 16Mike Veroukis16-Jan-2002 22:25 GMT
Comment 17ike16-Jan-2002 22:32 GMT
Comment 18Mika Hanhijärvi16-Jan-2002 22:34 GMT
Comment 19Mika Hanhijärvi16-Jan-2002 22:55 GMT
Comment 20Mika Hanhijärvi16-Jan-2002 23:01 GMT
Comment 21Seehund16-Jan-2002 23:48 GMT
Comment 22Frank17-Jan-2002 00:09 GMT
Comment 23Bill Toner17-Jan-2002 03:45 GMT
Comment 24Bill Toner17-Jan-2002 04:46 GMT
Comment 25priest17-Jan-2002 07:19 GMT
Comment 26Sotiris Papageorgiou17-Jan-2002 08:06 GMT
Comment 27adam ceremuga17-Jan-2002 08:19 GMT
Comment 28Anonymous17-Jan-2002 09:15 GMT
Comment 29Martin17-Jan-2002 09:29 GMT
Comment 30Amifan17-Jan-2002 09:29 GMT
Comment 31Amifan17-Jan-2002 09:32 GMT
Comment 32Anonymous17-Jan-2002 10:11 GMT
Comment 33Anonymous17-Jan-2002 10:18 GMT
Details on ATI Radeon support in OS4 : Comment 34 of 61ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 17-Jan-2002 11:14 GMT
In reply to Comment 23 (Bill Toner):
Well I understand your point, and I would be ready to pay for those drivers. I would like to supprt you and Amiga. But you shoul understand that it does matter for poor student like me how much the board costs. If I'm going to buy the card directly from you international shipping cots etc etc will be added to price. And I don't have credit card. If I buy that card from local Amiga dealer then the price will probavly be not maybe doubled but much higher anyway.
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List of all comments to this article (continued)
Comment 35Mika Hanhijärvi17-Jan-2002 11:15 GMT
Comment 36Alkis Tsapanidis17-Jan-2002 11:33 GMT
Comment 37Alkis Tsapanidis17-Jan-2002 11:39 GMT
Comment 38Christophe Decanini17-Jan-2002 12:22 GMT
Comment 39José17-Jan-2002 14:21 GMT
Comment 40priest17-Jan-2002 15:59 GMT
Comment 41Alkis Tsapanidis17-Jan-2002 16:40 GMT
Comment 42Mike Veroukis17-Jan-2002 16:47 GMT
Comment 43[JC]17-Jan-2002 17:14 GMT
Comment 44Christophe Decanini17-Jan-2002 17:23 GMT
Comment 45Anonymous17-Jan-2002 18:06 GMT
Comment 46Anonymous17-Jan-2002 18:31 GMT
Comment 47Anonymous17-Jan-2002 18:32 GMT
Comment 48Alkis Tsapanidis17-Jan-2002 20:08 GMT
Comment 49Mike Veroukis17-Jan-2002 20:55 GMT
Comment 50Amifan17-Jan-2002 21:30 GMT
Comment 51priest18-Jan-2002 06:21 GMT
Comment 52priest18-Jan-2002 06:24 GMT
Comment 53José18-Jan-2002 10:14 GMT
Comment 54Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 10:39 GMT
Comment 55Amifan18-Jan-2002 11:08 GMT
Comment 56Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 11:19 GMT
Comment 57Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 11:20 GMT
Comment 58Anonymous18-Jan-2002 13:44 GMT
Comment 59priest18-Jan-2002 15:23 GMT
Comment 60Alkis Tsapanidis18-Jan-2002 17:29 GMT
Comment 61Christophe Decanini18-Jan-2002 18:23 GMT
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