Author: Johan Klockars (as12-5-4.kp.g.bonet.se)
Date: 01-31-2002 00:49
> PCI Video cards Will be almost non-existant in a couple years.
Which is a good reason to do what I do:
Stack up on PCI graphics cards while they are still available on ebay etc. ;-)
The Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3 can be had at decent prices used these days, and since they are fully documented in publically available PDF's, drivers are likely to show up sooner or later.
The ATI cards are not bad either. fVDI already supports the RageII, and the RagePro was sold commercially with NVDI drivers. ATI is not completely unreasonable when it comes to releasing documentation, and the open source X drivers are supposedly decent for 2D at least (and 3D drivers are available), so more modern cards can get Atari drivers eventually.
The nVIDIA cards are probably not really a good option, though, since there have not been any open source drivers for those since the early days (the binary X drivers by nVIDIA themselves are really good, but that does not help us), and it appears to be impossible to get hardware documentation for the newer cards.
Regarding Matrox, I'm not sure what the open source driver or documentation status is, but I think it's similar to the ATI situation.
> Would be nice to have an agp to give a person more options for cards.
Yes. Since it could only be used for a graphics card, though, and you'd still need a separate PCI bus for other hardware, it could add quite a bit to the cost.
Anyway, a PCI RageII with 4 or 8 Mbyte memory should be enough for most things. Hopefully, I'll be able to get it to work in the Milan within the not too distant future, and other PCI based Atari compatible systems should not be much different.
So, get hold of one for $10-$20 and put it in a drawer for the time being. ;-)
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