MorphOS Developer
Posts: 510 from 2003/4/11
There are several issues you're overlooking, I think.
First of all you need hardware documentation. This is usually between hard and impossible to obtain, with the rare case of it being easy to obtain. In any case, you can expect this documentation to be incomplete or directly wrong. You're likely gonna spend a considerable amount of time just trying to figure out what's going on in the hardware when it doesn't work as documented. Even worse is it if you don't have any documentation - then you have to rely on another person's implementation to make your own driver. While this is doable, it's far from a perfect world, and you're lucky if you don't stumble into some sort of problem from doing things ever so slightly different than the driver you're basing your work on.
Even if the documentation is perfect and the hardware has no bugs (HAR!), actually writing the driver takes quite some time, and testing it equally long. It's not a weekend job we're talking about, and in the extreme cases, say, the R200 3D driver, a lot and lot of time is spent on ironing out all the small issues. And then there's all the fun with different versions/revisions of the hardware having different bugs.
In the end I'm not trying to discourage anyone from this, but expecting this to work for any slightly complex hardware is probably not very realistic. And then the price of the hardware is nowhere near in proportion to the amount of time it takes to write a driver for it. I would probably do such a thing if I didn't have a day job, though ;)
I rarely log in to MorphZone which means that I often miss private messages sent on here. If you wish to contact me, please email me at [username]@asgaard.morphos-team.net, where [username] is my username here on MorphZone.
