From: James A Simmons <jsimmons@acsu.buffalo.edu>
  To  : ggi-develop@eskimo.com
  Date: Fri, 18 Sep 1998 09:14:41 -0400 (EDT)

Re: NVidia is a horseshit company

> I personally think that keeping this information secure is kinda stupid,
> considering that there is so little information you can gather about how
> a chipset works on an internal level by the register lists- even 3dfx I
> can see why they would want to protect this (to prevent a third party
> from coming along and making something register-compatible so that they
> can use Glide) but since NVidia is only using D3D and OpenGL and other
> high level, licensable APIs, this isn't an issue.
>

That could happen by accident anyways. Also I believe with PCI you can
remap MMIO to somewhere else. That was the whole point of PCI. The ability
to map registers to some PCI memory space. Where PCI memory space was a
extension of normal memory.

> > The card is hard to ignore, so is it possible to, as John mentioned, hack
> > up a kludgy driver looking at the XFree Source?  I'm afraid that's out of
> > my expertise.
> 
> If they don't release specs, reverse engineering will probably happen. I
> may start looking into obtaining documentation under NDA myself in a
> month (I want a TNT, but Matrox or 3dfx are getting my business if
> Nvidia can't realize they are screwing their customers over in this way)
>

Yes. As I say. 
Open Source.  All knowing, All seeing, All hacking.