On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Rob Healey wrote:

> > There has always been enough hardware info (reverse-engineered or
> > otherwise) available to develop core drivers: input (maple), graphics, and
> > sound.  Sega was never really needed once the scene really picked up.
> >
> 	While technically true, having the docs straight from the
> 	horses mouth would probably save alot of time on tweeks. Not
> 	all the hardware features are necessarily known or used by the
> 	games.

  The problem is that getting documentation from Sega will be like pulling
teeth, and anything you get will be very incomplete.


  I worked for a third-party graphics driver developer for a couple of
years. We had contracts from large companies who needed drivers for a
given card, had signed all of the NDAs with the graphics driver companies,
and we *still* got incomplete and/or lousy documentation from the graphics
card companies, no matter how much we begged or threatened them for the
missing pieces.

  Companies were paranoid about their competitors learning too much about
their products' architectures by reading their manuals, and so kept *all*
information under lock and key.

  This is stupid because it hinders third-party development, and stupid
because given the year-or-two development lag, such information would do
the competitors no good, and stupid because anything that would be in a
manual would long since have been leaked by spies. But companies still do
this.


  In summary, if we have working code to look at, reverse-engineering will
probably be the less painful route (though it still involves a lot of
pain).

Ttyl,
				-Christopher Thomas