On Wednesday, October 29, 2003, at 12:28 AM, David M. Ensteness wrote:
On Oct 28, 2003, at 6:20 PM, Krevnik wrote:
Nope, sorry... don't buy that. There is an ATIRagePro.kext and ATIRageProGA.plugin (2D acceleration) and the GA plug wasn't even activated for the Lombard until 10.2.4, you needed a hack before that. The RagePro.kext refers to a non-existant ATIRageProGL.bundle for OpenGL acceleration. There is no 3D acceleration for the Rage Pro chips. The 128 Pro is NOT the same as the Rage Pro, but newer and appeared in the Pismos.
Another fact that is neglected. Apple did not write the ATi drivers for the ATi chipsets. ATi did, this is true of Classic Mac OS and Mac OS X. At the time, before the 10.1.5 update was released, people complained it was Apple not choosing to support it to "force" them to go buy new Macs. This argument gets brought up a lot, its generally false although I am sure there are cases when it is true.
Now, regarding video support. It is my understanding from a lot of reading I have done that the RagePro and RageII chipsets never did OpenGL under Mac OS 8 or 9, they did RAVE. At the time RAVE and GLIDE [from 3dfx] were competing and OpenGL was starting to enter the fray. Since none of us know the exact facts, think about this once and see if its not reasonable.
Apple sells a Mac, it has a chipset from a third party in it. The third party includes driver support. Apple puts out new system software, the third party doesn't update their driver. Its the third party's fault right? So according to that we should blame ATi. However, what if the chipset can't do the stuff we want it to do, ie, what if it can not support OpenGL acceleration. Whose fault is it then? Apple for embracing OpenGL in OS X? ATi for not making a fully compliant OpenGL graphics chipset? Sadly, somethings are not anyone's fault, they just are, and they are often things we don't like.
Is what I just proposed true? We don't know. However, its just as likely true as the complaints are so it deserves equal consideration.
But Apple does have control where the "serial port issue" was concerned. And they chose not to write support for the serial port into the OS. And this was a major issue to a lot of people. Especially those who had big bucks wrapped up in peripherals (laser printers, scanners, cameras, modems) that suddenly wouldn't work anymore. Our only other choice was to trash our serial stuff, buy a USB card and USB peripherals, and hope they had drivers for X. Look how long it took to get scanners that would work under X! I personally have a perfectly good Personal Laserwriter that was only usable on my Beige G3 by going into Classic and printing what I had done in X. Not exactly user friendly. Many of us kept hoping against hope that eventually Apple would "do the right thing", and add serial port support into a revision at some point so that we would finally be able to use our investment in peripherals again, but by 10.2, I knew it wasn't going to happen and bought a B&W and a cheap USB printer. Still, every time I look at that Laserwriter sitting there collecting dust, I get a frustrated feeling.
Yes, I love Apple too, and OS X, and I would never want to have to go back to the PC (Winblows) world I used to live in, but this is one time that I really wish that Apple had done things differently. And I'm looking at the same thing all over again with Panther. I just finally get a Powerbook (Wallstreet) capable of running X, and I won't be able to run the latest version on it. And my Beige G3 is of course left out. What will it be next version? Native G4 machines only?
Just my .02
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