On Fri, Mar 5, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Tom Buskey <t...@buskey.name> wrote: >> I remember that! Computers with the hottest graphics hardware on >> the planet, and Doom still did all rendering in software and just >> blitted bitmaps to X. :) > > Didn't Doom use OpenGL as its engine? Id is one of the reasons DirectX > didn't wipe out OpenGL.
Nope, Doom used a one-off, all-software rendering engine. Doom ran on MS-DOS, in the days of Windows 3.x, before 3D hardware acceleration was really available on the IBM-PC. Heck, the fact that it used i386 protected mode was something of a big leap forward. I still remember the "DOS/4GW" banner from startup. One of the reasons Doom received so much praise is how it managed to get so much done on a fairly craptacular OS and hardware platform. I seem to recall once reading that the id Software level designer ran on SGI's using OpenGL, and that was initially a barrier to bringing a designer to the consumer market. Third-parties ended up building stripped down map editors -- they just drew a top-down line map instead of visualizing, but they could run on the pee sea. >> > That mainstream OS is probably the iPhone OS, not MacOSX. >> >> I wonder, if Droid takes off like iPhone did, will that bring more >> interest to Linux? > > You mean Android right? Droid is one model of phone using the Android > platform. Yes and no, because... > I've read of fragmentation in the Android market. Exactly. Droid seems like the first Android phone that's getting marketing budget, mainstream attention and adoption, and also has an impressive feature set. While widespread use of Android as a generic phone engine might be good for Linux tech, it's not going to help the desktop market much because it's not going to be attracting application programmers. But if Droid gathers the kind of developer ecosystem that iPhone has, *that* might be a gateway drug for the Linux desktop. -- Ben _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
