I was more alluding to the hope that some TI/Imgtech/Nokia employee risks life and limb to throw us a working copy of the drivers. Having the drivers magically appear on the InterTubes... You know, cloak and dagger stuff....



@qole
Sounds like a project! But....

Software rendering must kill the battery while slowing down the entire device

even if we highly optimized it... Though I guess it is better than nothing at the moment...

jzencovich,

go and look at liqbase

http://liqbase.net/
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/OS2008/liqbase/

It has some very nifty tricks up its sleeve for making the best out of what is available.

Sure rendering full 3d live displays will be battery intensive, but thats the same with hardware or software - its no more than playing a movie or playing other games.

I don't see why its *not* possible to get respectable 3d rendering out of this device, its never going to be perfect in software but its possible.
Think about when you play a game on a PC< you have options - you can change the screen resolution, you can change the texture density, you can alter the level of detail on the models, you can tweak antialias settings, but at the end of this you can basically play the same game on a whole range of PCs with totally different capabilities.

Here, we have no default options at all, I think we could do something about that.


qole, any chance you could put a little something together instruction wise for installing that library? (or even push the library into extras-devel), you have a lot more experience with deb than I.

Yeah, I was going through your project Gary, good stuff.

You're right to a certain degree... but it's just plain annoying that we have a decent video card and just can't use it

jzen,
make what you can, I'm upset that my car has an engine but I can't fly with it (we were promised flying cars by now damnit!).

I have this device here and I want to use it to its fullest potential.
Until a driver comes (and its looking less and less likely tbh) I will do what I can.

In the field of computers 3d cards are really new, do you think john carmack sat back originally and waited for drivers?
Did the gurus at Ocean software or Psygnosis wait for Commodore to update the amiga hardware for more stuff?
What about the Woz, he gave Apple their graphics when none existed?


lets stop moping - we have a really powerful device in the palm of our hands.

Be creative and find ways to use the device to its fullest.

I just installed it in my Easy Debian chroot. It's just "apt-get install" and away you go.

I always feel like such a cheater when I confess that.

qole,
lol - as do i. easy things to me are kinetics and throwing graphics around the screen, but others give a blank look

I will see what it takes to build it inside my horrible vmware.

I could really do with a proper build machine, but the craptop is crap and vmware shed is even worse.

/me wishes for proper full true on device building without hoops.

Gary, to be honest with you, I half typed a car metaphor comparing the lack of graphics drivers.

But I was in a rush to go out so I just deleted it all and wrote that two line response. I find it incredibly hilarious that as soon as I get back home I see you got a car metaphor in there. Makes me a bit mad that I didn't throw mine in

--

Ok, you have a point, let me know when you reverse engineer us some drivers!

Jon


(I'll be waiting... )

It's more like "I've got a V8 engine, but it's only using 4 of the cylinders because the manufacturer won't give us the parts to get the other 4 working. I can drive it around, but it's not as good as it could be"

Speaking of Apple, the iPhone and iPod Touch both have OpenGL with hardware acceleration. Google Earth got ported the other day, and X-Plane (a full 3D flight sim) made it on there a few weeks ago. And they both run great.

It would be awesome to have this sort of thing on the Maemo platform.

I'm not sure if this'll help, but I found the 2700G documentation I mentioned earlier:
http://int.xscale-freak.com/XSDoc/2700G/30094801.pdf

Page 61 and 100 look especially interesting. Not sure how registers would be different (perhaps just offset?) between the OMAP and the 2700.

I looked at that Google Earth app. It was really stupid and useless, unless you want to "play with the globe." There are some games that put it to good use though, and I think that OpenGL is what separates the iPhone from other stuff (even if they have OpenGL, like say WM, its not universal).

Side Note: Why has Google not released Earth for Android? Kinda makes no sense...