I do NOT want to go back to the times when we had to write and ship individual drivers for each graphics card, sound card and peripheral we wanted to support in our software.
Could you imagine having to select the physical port, IRQ and DMA channel of your sound device for each app that wants to output sound? Because that's what had to be done in DOS and screens like this https://flaterco.com/kb/audio/PCI/DS-XG_IRQ_error.png
were commonplace. Good enough if you had well-defined devices like SoundBlaster(Pro) or GUS that you could auto-detect without crashing the PC, but a living nightmare with clones that didn't quite behave the same way.
So unless you only plan to support a single set of well-defined hardware, device drivers are a must.
> I do NOT want to go back to the times when we had to write and ship individual drivers for each graphics card, sound card and peripheral we wanted to support in our software.
This 1000x - I remember this time and it was quite painful
>Could you imagine having to select the physical port, IRQ and DMA channel of your sound device for each app that wants to output sound? Because that's what had to be done in DOS and screens like this https://flaterco.com/kb/audio/PCI/DS-XG_IRQ_error.png were commonplace. Good enough if you had well-defined devices like SoundBlaster(Pro) or GUS that you could auto-detect without crashing the PC, but a living nightmare with clones that didn't quite behave the same way.
I also remember the application working one second, unrelated hardware change (1), and back to the drawing board all over again
I do NOT want to go back to the times when we had to write and ship individual drivers for each graphics card, sound card and peripheral we wanted to support in our software.
Could you imagine having to select the physical port, IRQ and DMA channel of your sound device for each app that wants to output sound? Because that's what had to be done in DOS and screens like this https://flaterco.com/kb/audio/PCI/DS-XG_IRQ_error.png
were commonplace. Good enough if you had well-defined devices like SoundBlaster(Pro) or GUS that you could auto-detect without crashing the PC, but a living nightmare with clones that didn't quite behave the same way.
So unless you only plan to support a single set of well-defined hardware, device drivers are a must.