Somehow the FOSS crowd seems to propagate this myth that only Microsoft has vendor specific graphics APIs and the rest of the world runs on OpenGL.

Never understood how it got born.

It was probably born out of the fact that this is the truth for PC gaming, where Microsoft uses DirectX and "all" the other platforms use OpenGL.

For a long time, console game development was obscure and unaccessible (and to a large extent, this is still the case), so aspiring game developers had somewhat of a tunnel vision when it came to game platforms.

> It was probably born out of the fact that this is the truth for PC gaming, where Microsoft uses DirectX and "all" the other platforms use OpenGL.

Except Acorn, Atari, Amiga, Mac OS (<= 9) never had real OpenGL support as well.

Right, but we're talking about 3D hardware APIs, which didn't really exist in a large scale until the late 90's/early 2000's.

You mean like Warp3D (Amiga) and QuickDraw3D (Apple) ?

But then add Glide (DOS), please. :-)

I remember playing Screamer 2 with that. I think my brother still has his 3dfx cards lying around (Voodoo Dragon, Banshee etc.)

Happy times. The music in Screamer 1 was better though, more noodly guitar music in the style of Satriani.

I left it out on purpose, because DOS was a Microsoft platform as well.

> I left it out on purpose, because DOS was a Microsoft platform as well.

MS-DOS was a Microsoft platform, but not DOS itself:

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DR-DOS

Also Glide was not a Microsoft API.

I just wrote DOS as I always abbreviated MS-DOS as DOS.

DR-DOS actually came with the first PC I bought and it was for all effects a MS-DOS clone, hence a DOS clone, like PC-DOS from IBM and a few others on those days.

> DR-DOS actually came with the first PC I bought and it was for all effects a MS-DOS clone, hence a DOS clone, like PC-DOS from IBM and a few others on those days.

Under this argumentation GNU/Linux or even OS X is a UNIX clone and both should be abbreviated to UNIX (or UN*X to avoid trademark violations ;-) ). Indeed both originate from UNIX clones - but then new features were added that made them better than the original in a sense. The same happened to DR-DOS. Read DR-DOS' wikipedia article to read about features that DR-DOS added over Microsoft's original.

I was a DR-DOS user, too (Novell DOS 7).

But I believe Glide wasn't a Microsoft API, so the example is still fine to defend your case.

I said large scale, not very many people had the accelerators required to use these APIs. Glide is perhaps the first real example to hit a scale that mattered.

yeah, the one time i tried to use psgl as a time saver it was a lesson in how broken, unmaintained and poorly documented it was...

i'm pretty sure it would have worked at some point because the docs indicated that it had. however - writing a gl like layer over the top of the rsx stuff is not a particular challenge - the functionality maps extremely well.

"the advantage of a console: hardware is fixed". YEP! Why use an abstraction layer when you can just code to the metal.

Time? Do you write all your applications in assembly?

Many games run on multiple consoles.

Still a pretty small number (2-8 max?) compared to all of the PC configurations you have to worry about in DX and OpenGL land.