Out in Front: June 20, 1996
Develop graphics drivers in a week
The DriveThru family of development tools from Metabyte allows creation of a graphics driver in a matter of days. The tools let designers enter hardware-specific display-mode information into a table. The software then uses the table information to produce a functional device driver automatically. The ability to quickly create a driver is especially useful during design and debugging of a graphics device.
The automatically generated driver takes no advantage of acceleration features but does provide hooks for designers to tune the driver to the hardware's acceleration opportunities. Once you complete the acceleration design, you can quickly port it to several operating systems. The tools are available in Windows 3.1, Windows NT, Windows 95, and OS/2 versions, and each can derive drivers from code produced for another operating system. The tools cost $20,000 in Windows versions and $30,000 for OS/2. They include a distribution license for one graphics-device design.
—by Richard A Quinnell
Metabyte Inc, Fremont, CA. (510) 494-9700.
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