I recently purchased Mario Kart for the Wii. It's a hella good time. However, it contains on of those mis-features of console games that makes me hate consoles. Why do I have to play the single-player game to "unlock" 50% of the content for multi-player? I paid for 100% of the content, so I'd like to be able to play it...without having to pay for it again by playing to boring-ass single-player game. kthnks.
Unlocking parts of the game was cool when it was unlocking a bonus level or a bonus character. Having to unlock a large portion of the regular game is just insulting.
sigh...
Posted by Ian Romanick at 11:05 2008-05-03 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Beta release...finally! (Development of xf86-video-xgi and xf86-video-xgixp drivers)
Yesterday I finally made a beta release of the XP10 driver. The driver uses native mode setting (instead of calling the BIOS), RANDR 1.2 (thanks to keithp and anholt). It currently only supports the VGA output, but that should be resolved shortly. It also still has the color byte-ordering issue on big-endian. In spite of all that, I think that it's pretty solid on x86.
Now, if I could just get a hold of ajax to get this in X.org 7.4 and Fedora 9...
Posted by Ian Romanick at 14:42 2008-05-02 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (1)
Har-har-har! (General)
Dear Mr. Weather,
We received your April Fool's Day joke a bit early this year. Thank you for reminding us that global warming means weird weather, not hot weather. That said, may we please have spring back FFS?!?!?!
Posted by Ian Romanick at 09:19 2008-03-28 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
Reason for all the XP10 love (Development of xf86-video-xgi and xf86-video-xgixp drivers)
This week at POWER.org's Power Architecture Dev Con '07 IBM showed a system that is known internally as Bimini. At the conference it was shown with X running doing a continuous loop of kernel compiles. It's a 4-way PowerPC 970MP (2 CPUs, 2 cores per CPU) system targeted at developers. It has a PCI-Express x16 slot, and that slot ships filled with an XP10 card.
All of this XGI XP10 work that I have been doing over the last few months has been for this system. I put in some long hours last week trying to get the driver into shape for this demo, and I'm pretty pleased with the result. There is, however, still quite a bit of work to be done. The existing driver does most things (mode setting, DDC, DPMS, etc.) using BIOS calls. Obviously, that doesn't work on PowerPC! In my local tree I have single-head CRT mode setting working without the BIOS, but there's a lot of ugliness there...it also doesn't save / restore the console mode.
If you've looked through the published docs for XP10 at all, you've probably noticed that there is a lot of information about mode setting missing. I'm (painfully) aware of that, and I'm working with XGI to get that resolved.
Posted by Ian Romanick at 10:00 2007-09-25 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (2242)
XGI driver 1.5.0 release (Development of xf86-video-xgi and xf86-video-xgixp drivers)
As per the message sent to the xorg-annouse list, I've just released version 1.5.0 of the XGI driver. This is the driver for the V3XT, Z7, and various releated chips. I should also have a libpciaccess release out pretty soon. I'm hoping to get a release for the XP10 out soon, but I'm not sure it will make it out in time for the X.org 7.3 release. We'll see...
Posted by Ian Romanick at 17:07 2007-08-27 | Trackbacks (0) | Comments (0)
