6600joef@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Joe Foster) (04/22/91)
In article <1991Apr17.221222.4424@midway.uchicago.edu> goer@ellis.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) writes: >With this kind of obstinacy and short-sightedness, it's hardly any wonder >that the quantity of publicly accessible software available for SCO Xenix >is so limited. Maybe I'm just a starry-eyed academic, but if someone calls >and says they want to do some free work for you that will make your system >more accessible to users, you hand over some information. It's not as if >we're talking about trade secrets. It's not as if letting ATI specs into >the wrong hands will cut into SCO or ATI's business in any way. >Stupid stupid. >(Thanks to Joe Foster for so kindly communicating his efforts to the rest >of us.) >-Richard >-- You are an incurable starry-eyed academic. Either that, or I have gotten used to being accused of being a clonemaker/pirate whenever I ask a company for the low-level info needed to write a working driver. Tech support people that aren't familiar with UNIX/XENIX just don't know that you can't use the BIOS in XENIX, and are dubious when I tell them this. Oh, I finally harassed ATI enough for them to agree to sell me the VGAWonder technical reference for another $40. I had to repeat "it's cheaper than a Silicon Graphics coprocessor" to myself about 10 times. All this to get a toy 3-D graphics package I wrote to make pretty pictures! I wish SCO included sample source code for a screen driver with their development system, since those are a lot different from either block or character devices, and there are a lot more kinds of requests that have to be handled, or are all those just for text modes? I wish DOS could do virtual memory (no, I *don't* want to port it to MS-Windows!) so I wouldn't have to go through all this! Joe "Blackbeard" Foster ;-)