I have not been around the professional world as long a many, but I have
been around long enough to recognize the spectre of scope creep raising
it's ugly head. The recent threads about setting video modes has once
again made me aware the problem. First let me say that the discussion
is certainly valid, however the outcome will not matter one bit if we
don't have a video card on which to set the video mode.
As much as "anti-establishment" folks will hate me for saying it, there
is no way that we can support every crazy, oddball configuration that
some fringe person may have, right out of the box. In fact we won't
even be able to support all the oddball configurations non-fringe folks
have, out of the box.
We must have the following to make the card work: a PCI interface, a
memory controller, a graphics pipeline, video controller, and VGA
emulation. Until we have those things functional the rest of it doesn't
matter a bit. Once we have a functioning prototype in the FPGA, we can
start talking about "special features".
I know that everyone wants to have their most hated deficiency in the
current state of affairs fixed by this project. However the goal of
this project is to create a open spec, open design, eventually open
source graphics card, not to fix everyone's pet peeves.
Sorry to pick on the video mode thread, it just happened to be the most
recent. No offense to those involved as it really is a valid
discussion; I just think now is not the right time for it. We can note
that it is something that needs to be kept in consideration and
revisited when we start working through the ASIC feature list, after we
have a working system in the development board.
Sorry for the weekend rant everyone. :)
Patrick M
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