It’s an impossible task to write about every blog update that goes on in BeOS-land, but there’s a lot of blogs out there with interesting updates. I hope to bring you an update on the latest happenings every couple of weeks or so.

I’ll check the blogs, so you don’t have to ™.

First up is Rudolf, who reports on his 3D development blog that he has just completed stage 1 on his quest for real hardware 3D acceleration under BeOS. Now the Z-buffer, texturing and simple rendering are carried out by the graphics hardware. Quake 2 in OpenGL mode can now run at over 40fps (depending on hardware and settings), compared to 2.8fps using MESA 3.2 without any acceleration. The next steps are to move the code over to the current version of MESA and to attempt to get DMA access to the card for 3D operations, which will bring a nice futher speedup (estimated between 2 and 5 times faster). For now the driver is limited to older GeForce and TNT cards, due to lack of specs on the recent models.

Next up is Bryan Varner, who has added some (hopefully truthful, now it’s not April 1st) teasing tidbits about his latest project. It looks like some sort of keyboard control for the mouse pointer, but he is keeping rather quiet on the details. Coming soon? I hope so, it certainly looks interesting anyway.

Niels Reedijk is working on the USB stack for Haiku. He successfully completed the first transfer using Haiku’s stack at the end of last month, but has recently posted about some troubles he has ran into. Problems are inevitable along the road to success and I’m certain Niels will figure out this latest problem.

Michael Lotz’s Blog details his experiements with Haiku. He has already demonstrated the Haiku app_server running his MiniTerminal application, and recently switched his attention to seeing how much networking was possible on Haiku. The latest post details how he got the links text browser working on Haiku. The same binary works on both BeOS BONE and Haiku and has been posted to BeBits.

Last but not least, tqh has been working on adding drag and drop support to the BeOS ports of Mozilla and Firefox. Drag and drop support is one of the few missing functionalities in our ports, so this is an important step for the project.

Most of the blogs have more details on these items, just follow the links. If there’s any interesting blogs I’m missing then post a comment and I’ll include it in my next round of updates.