Ask HN: How were graphics card drivers programmed back in the 90s?
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-8.html
I have done a few simple embedded driver development but graphic cards, even in the 90s, look like beasts to me.
I don't think there is any books on this topic -- the best thing we have is Linux Device Driver, and I don't think any book is going to dive deep into graphic card driver development. If I want to know the details, I'll probably read the source code of OSS drivers.
I'm wondering if there are more stories or blogs like this (maybe in the 80s too, remember those Hercules cards?). It really warms me up thinking about sitting in a cube, writing code for device drivers, reading docs everywhere, banging my head on every solid wall until I start to see code in air, quaffing coffee one by one, going into deep night...I know it's way more romantic than the real story but I can't keep myself wondering about it.
This isn't 250 something pages, only 132 so maybe I was wrong, but its a good look into how the Voodoo2 worked: https://www.dosdays.co.uk/media/3dfx/voodoo2.pdf
See also: https://3dfxarchive.com/reference.htm
A fun tidbit is the voodoo2 has a 2D mode but was not VESA compliant so it could not be used in a PC without being tied to a VESA card for 2D graphics. I believe that ability was there for custom and non-pc platforms.
I was even thinking about getting my hand on a few cheap physical cards (not sure which ones are cheaper), a Pentium box, and see if I can do anything -- even displaying some colors is fun enough.
The biggest effort about them was reverse-engineering certain cards. The games often used very strange video settings, and the card manufacturers had poor, sometimes no, documentation about their operation at a low level.