No subject

buried within them. For example, ATi and their OEMs release a series of 
cards called "All-In-Wonder" with each new chip. These AIW cards have a 
ton of extras on them like TV-tuners, hardware media decoders, the works. 
So for people looking to by a single card to perform multiple tasks 
rather than buying a Radeon, DXR3, tv tuner, etc, this is a good 
deal. However, those extras such the TV tuner and media decoder chips 
aren't necessarily ATi's own design. And for some reason, ATi can't 
release specs on everything *but* the proprietary chips (And some  
industry "analysts" call the GPL viral!). 

But then again, I have no way of verifying this, and it's a discussion 
for another BBS :)

On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Terry Blunt wrote:

> "Hendricks David W." <dwh at lanl.gov> wrote:
> 
> > We don't need to with nVidia, we can run their VGA BIOS using testbios.
> > 
> > Though in the perfect world, they'd be more forthcoming with specs so that
> > someone can make an LB port for their nForce boards.
> > 
> > On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Carlos Silva wrote:
> > 
> > > Really nice news... i'll keep dreaming that nvidia will do the same.
> 
> Maybe I'm missing something, but I can never understand hardware
> manufacturers being cagey about their specs. I would have thought it would
> save them a lot of hassle if they *didn't* have to write drivers themselves.
> If they made the information available with suggestions and worked examples,
> the software industry would do it all for them.
> 
> To forestall one argument, I really don't see anyone being able to reverse
> engineer the *hardware* from the overall specs.
> 
>