Conclusion

7 - Conclusion

Writing video drivers is nice to do a while. It is very instructive and (yet) good to do when the whole structure is addressed. Sometimes writing video drivers requires the necessary imagination from the programmer, because it is difficult to test some (combinations) of things or make them testable.

Also, the retrieval and understanding of the specifications is sometimes a challenge. Even if there is some documentation from a chip or card manufacturer, you still need to be puzzled regularly. Probably because of the big pressure from the manufacturers to be first with a new card on the market, you can see that the documentation is often bad or incomplete.

To summarize: Anyone who has a challenge should start writing a (BeOS) video driver. The documentation and guidelines in this document are already a very long way to come. Especially the included roadmap is an important tool. But it remains a challenge…