Re: Windows Assembly

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005 02:15:07 -0400, Robert Redelmeier <redelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard Cooper <spamandviruses@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
Damn, reading about that I'd get the impression that Linux
has excellent graphics support.


Where would you get this idea???  Linux is fundamentally
texed based Unix, and has some hardware support for X.
But X runs in _userland_, not kernel space.


I got that idea from here:
http://dri.freedesktop.org/~jonsmirl/graphics.html

Mentions everything even remotely good, even if it's mostly vapor, hardly touches the bad. Then it blames what is bad on video card manufactures with this:

" Just in case you haven't, noticed graphics vendors really only care about MS Windows so they do the minimum driver support they can get away with for Linux. "

Nevermind that the graphics vendors already provide VESA which Linux insists isn't good enough. Why do more when Linux won't even use what's already available to it?

Linux doesn't seem to realize that it's a small time OS. I don't think graphics vendors made video drivers for Windows either when Windows only had 5% of the market share. But rather than do something like design a good Linux graphics API that vendors can easily write a driver to slip into, and then fully documenting this API and making an nice instructional document on how to write a video driver using this simple and easy API, they'd rather just bitch and moan.

Make it easy (and therefore less costly) to make a video driver, and more vendors will do it. With the current undocumented mess of partial functionality, I'm not at all surprised that most aren't willing to bother with it when all it gets them is an additional 1% of sales. (remember that most linux users will buy video cards, driver or no driver) Somewhere there's an equation that determines if that 1% of sales will generate more money than it cost to develop that driver, and if you lower the cost of developing that driver enough, then it will become less than the revenue generated by that 1% of sales, and those drivers will begin being made.

You also have to make sure that that driver API will work on all Linux systems that support it. If it doesn't, and people start calling tech support because the latest Linux kernel is refusing to work correctly with the driver, then the money from that 1% of sales disappears again.

That's where I'm at with this game I want to make. If I'm going to sell it, then it damned well better work for everyone. The fact that they get to try it as shareware first doesn't matter. No one wants to buy it, then upgrade SDL (or whatever it uses), or buy a new computer, and find that it no longer works the same, and I don't want to deal with people emailing me saying things like "on my old computer I could switch to 320x240 mode, but on my new one when I do that all it does is run in a little 320x240 window, it doesn't run full screen, and since I payed for this game I demand that you fix this." There's nothing I can do about the fact that their new Linux distribution runs X in framebuffer mode and therefore it's no longer able to switch video modes.

That's why I think that game developers stay away from Linux. In Windows they can make their games work exactly the same for everyone, in Linux, some features will work on some systems but not on others, and there's really nothing they can do about it. When Linux ditches ALSA for something new the same way it ditched OSS for ALSA, the sound is going to stop working, and then they have to go and release a new version of the game to avoid upsetting their customers.

Linux games tend to suck, but it's not from a lack of effort on the part of the people writing the games, it's just that making anything a really nice piece of software is really difficult in Linux. You would think that the fact that someone has never seen a really good Linux game that runs on everybody's system would indicate to people that writing such a game is impossible, but somehow they insist that it is possible and it's only not being done because the game developers are *** buddies with Microsoft.

What Linux people need to realize is that if a nuclear bomb was dropped on Redmond WA tomorrow, Linux would still suck just as much as it does sucks today. It's not Windows's fault that Linux sucks, it's Linux's fault. All the video drivers in the world wouldn't change that.

The closest they've come is someone made the kernel so that
at bootup it'll make _one_ VESA call to switch to _one_
graphics mode.  Once it's in that mode, it stays in that
mode forever.

Not quite. Have a look at svgalib or SVGATextMode. 

That's not the kernel.  I was talking about the kernel's use of VESA.

For some reason calling the VESA BIOS after boot is out of
the question.

Natch! VESA BIOS is real-mode code, not pmode.

Attitudes like that are exactly what's wrong with Linux. That's like refusing to use DOS Edit (real mode) because it's not Notepad (protected mode) and instead hacking together a bunch of different things which when combined make a system of which you can usually find one or two members that will output the text document that you want. That's a stupid thing to do when all you've got to do is start a DOS session and use DOS Edit.
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