What is the history of the driver?

# 6 What is the history of the driver?

Contents of this section

The complete history of the driver is rather cloudy. The following is probably incomplete and inaccurate.

Apparently, Per Lindqvist (pgd@compuram.bbt.se) first got an ATI driver working with an early ATI card under X386 1.1a. This original driver may have actually been based on an non-functional ATI driver written by Roell. Then Doug Evans (dje@cygnus.com) ported the driver to the ATI XL, trying in the process to make the driver work with all other ATI cards.

Rik Faith (faith@cs.unc.edu) obtained the X11R4 driver from Doug Evans in the summer of 1992, and ported the code to the X386 part of X11R5. This subsequently became part of XFree86.

I (Marc La France) have since taken the driver over after Rik got rid of his VGA Wonder card.

The major reference that was used was a manual from ATI:

"VGA WONDER Programmer's Reference" ATI Technologies, 1991. Release 1.3 -- Reference # PRG28800-13

However, Chapter 11 (ATI 18800 ATI VGAWONDER) of George Sutty and Steve Blair's "Advanced Programmer's Guide to SuperVGAs" (Brady/Simon & Schuster, 1990) was also useful. Further, someone e-mailed Rik a random document from the ATI BBS which was dated 3Jul91 and which may have been named PROGINFO.DOC.

Next Chapter, Previous Chapter

Table of contents of this chapter, General table of contents

Top of the document, Beginning of this Chapter