Re: Virgil 3D renderer on macOS

[Akihiko Odaki]

2021年2月13日(土) 12:20 Programmingkid <programmingkidx@gmail.com>:
> I am also an M1 Mac owner. I don't know very much about graphics cards but I 
> would be happy to help if you need a tester.

I don't need a tester now because I have not fixed even likely-obvious
performance and compatibility problems which I can find out easily if
I debug it or I run some serious performance/conformance test
programs. But thank you for your proposal.

>
> I was doing a lot of thinking about implementing a 3D video card in QEMU. One 
> option was to port PCem's Voodoo2 card to QEMU. Another option was to 
> implement the ATI Rage 128 card. Drivers wouldn't probably be a problem since 
> they already exist for Mac OS and Windows. One issue users might encounter is 
> game support. Both these cards are older and probably are missing features 
> that newer games need. Then there's the problem of proprietary firmware files 
> these cards probably use. So I was wondering what your opinion on this issue. 
> Should we focus on emulating a real video card or focus on making Virgil 3D 
> compatible with more operating systems?

The latter. I have no idea how complex such ancient accelerators are,
but probably fewer people than those interested in Virgil are
interested in them. The difference is quite important; you can reuse
code written for different purposes if you hack an existing program,
Virgil. In the case of my port, I made Virgil 3D renderer run on a
macOS/CGL host where it was mainly written for Linux/DRM hosts. You
can do the same, and port Virgil 3D drivers which already exist to
other platforms although it should be much harder than my port, which
is essentially fixes of some minor problems of programs written with
standard APIs (OpenGL).