MOTM

in the wintel world, there is a minimum required standard for 
hardware compatibility. that includes keyboard & video & by now 
probably usb etc. your box has to be able to boot from the windows 
cdrom and install windows, with the bios providing the only 
abstraction layer. otherwise you wouldn't get far enough to install 
any custom drivers.

>I think the issue here is that Apple provides the drivers for its own
>video, audio, NIC and such but nothing else.

that's all it needs. what else would you have them provide?

all the other drivers are standard (across the windows version). note 
there aren't different usb midi driver downloads for compaq, dell, 
hp, etc. they are all the same. because the interfaces the *driver* 
talks to are standard. at the top, it implements the windows midi 
device api. at the bottom, it talks to the windows usb api, which in 
turn is implemented by the usb driver for your motherboard. you find 
your device via the usb api and then talk whatever proprietary stuff 
you want (via standard usb api i/o calls) once you've found it.

>If you have a stand-alone MIDI interface that connects through a PCI
>card, you may well be out of luck.

you have to make your PCI bus available via the standard calls. 
otherwise even the installer won't work.

>You may also be out of luck if your MIDI interface connects through a
>USB interface but the interface driver authors "got cute" and wrote
>something that is based on WinTel hardware.

hello? this *is* a wintel hardware box. this *is* a PC. it is *not* emulation.

the fact that it has an apple logo on the front doesn't make it *not* 
a PC, any more than a powerpc chip inside makes a powermac *not* a 
macintosh. it has nothing in common with any previous apple hardware. 
the only potential difference between this box and a(nother) generic 
wintel box is the rumoured bit of DRM in the bios necessary for 
running Mac OS X.

any driver authors that got cute can expect flaky compatibility on 
other manufacturers' wintel boxes too. it's not like the apple intel 
box is one way and all the other wintel boxes are another way. they 
are all 5% different from each other.

of course, apple might have screwed up. but if so, that's a bios bug, 
not a fundamental architecture difference. and that article link i 
posted seems to indicate that it works.

my last post on this topic, which is way OT for MOTM! :-)

j

disclaimer: i worked for a PC emulation company for a long time