Since receiving the developer material for Picasso96, I have built a skeleton driver: RadeonHD.chip. At present this skeleton does absolutely nothing; it fails on initialization of the graphics card. However, the system will correctly identify a Radeon HD graphics card and load the RadeonHD.chip driver. This is, thus, a small baby step toward a basic frame-buffer driver (which will be the first milestone). 

I now have access to all the required developer documentation and source-code for developing a Picasso96 driver. There is quite a volume of information to wade through. The goal now is to work toward a simple framebuffer driver; no hardware acceleration, just a framebuffer. 

A generous donor has provided me with a Diamond Radeon HD 2400 pro PCI card. I am pleased to announce that, with a small amount of coding, the Radeon HD driver can now initialize this card, and open a screen. This card uses the RV610 chipset and is one generation newer than the Radeon x1300 that was originally used as test card. Now that two cards from different generations have successfully been initialized using the code, it should be fairly easy to add support for more. In fact, many R5xx and R6xx cards should work without any changes to the code.

Today marks the first milestone in the RadeonHD for Amiga OS 4 project. A Radeon X1300 graphics card has successfully been programmed to open a 1280x1024 true-colour screen and an image has been displayed. The graphics card was a VisionTek Radeon X1300 256MB PCI card that has been plugged into one of the PCI slots in my Amiga-one for over half a year now. With this success, I am now confident that I can, in time, write a proper Amiga OS 4.x driver for this card. Thus, this project is now revealed on this website for the first time.