From: Kenneth Johansson <ken@canit.se>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Sat, 13 Feb 1999 17:48:29 +0100

Re: STB and S3 tech specs

"Jon M. Taylor" wrote:

> On Thu, 11 Feb 1999, Mike McQuade wrote:
>
> > Warning: the following is a rant.
>
>         Your rant contains many misconceptions, many of which I also
> belived before I started working "on the inside" at Creative Labs.  Let me
> try to correct some of those misconceptions.
>
> > You have to wonder about these hardware manufacturers,
> > they make their money off of hardware don't they ?
>
>         They try to, sure.
>
> > Why do some of them shoot themselves in the foot
> > by withholding technical information from the fastest
> > growing market in technology.
>
>         Because releasing their specs would allow their competitors to
> reverse-engineer their hardware.  If you know the register layout, you can
> hook up a logic analyzer to the chip(s) and discover exactly what the
> internals of the chip are.  EXACTLY, down to the individual logic gates!
> And since that layout is a trade secret and not patented, if your
> competitors figure it out they can clone it 100%, not pay you anything,
> and get rich.  This _has_ happened, exactly as I described above, many
> times in the past.
>
>

Well Jon this is not even remotely true. There is no possibilty to map
hardware EXACTLY. Its in fact very hard to test hardware even if you have
constructed it yourself. If it was possible what do you need the spec for??
it would just be a matter of doing the clone no need to know how it works.
But Its not possible

The only thing they gain is that the registers is not documented and someone
doing a clone can get the function wrong if it was not use by current
drivers. But doing a clone in this market is STUPID (in fact,really really
stupid)

Lets say that a company want to take market from 3dfx. to do that they do not
have to clone 3dfx registers- they can make a design that is totally
different. All they have to do is writing a software layer that maps glide
api to theirs card.

The graphics market do not have software that is tied to the mnemonics of the
card as the CPU market has. So the registers have no value to the company
they just think it has.

The last graphics standard that was worth copying was VGA and that one came
87. Since then no register standard have been directly used by programs and
thus the register has had no value in themself.


The ONLY sane reason not to relsease the information is suppport issues.
Often different chip revisions have some small changes and keeping everyone
up to date can be quite a lot of work. Also someone have to write good
documentation.