Reply 60 of 73, by Scali
wrote:Results are mixed enough that you can't count on it being supported, so it wouldn't make much sense to write software that relies on it.
That is the takeaway.
Until I wrote these experimental tools and had people run them on a wide variety of hardware, I had no idea of how broad the support was for this feature.
Now we know that it is indeed not something you can generally count on. I mean, if it was say one in 20 video cards that wouldn't support it, especially if those would be the cheap brands like Trident or Realtek, I could justify using it.
But it seems that even many popular and high-end cards don't support it (or the chips do, but it's not connected on the PCB).
The only thing that's still missing is the results of a real IBM PS/2.
I mean, with 8088 MPH, our justification was that at least all our code worked perfectly on any true blue IBM (5150, 5155 and 5160).
If this feature works relibably on a PS/2, then at least I could create some kind of '8088 MPH' for the PS/2, and use this as one of its defining features.