This is a noble goal, but sadly I don''t think its possible. Manufacturers guard the details of their drivers and hardware very, very closely, and so the chances of an independent developer managing to write an API that can communicate with all the various drivers in production is very slim. The whole point of DX/OGL is to protect developers from the nastiness of video hardware anyways; I for one still remember the old days of writing specific drivers for each video card you wanted to support, and my memories are not fond.

To do this you''d literally have to reverse engineer every video card you want to support and write a custom interface to the card''s drivers. You could quite likely do this for a few cards, but you''d end up spending all your time trying to talk to the drivers instead of getting your API written. Besides, there''s a good chance you could be sued for reverse-engineering trade secret technology.

Its a big risk, and I doubt you''d manage to get a working API without a huge amount of effort; regardless, you''d never have a chance of competing with DX/OGL. If you''re interested in the learning experience of hacking apart drivers and working with low-level hardware, then by all means, go for it; I learned a lot about video hardware doing that myself (unfortunately all of my knowledge is 6 years old and entirely worthless). But if you just want experience writing an API of some kind, there are better ways; I''d suggest writing a plugin API for a small application, or a custom GUI library, etc.

Please don''t take this as a flat out "you can''t do it" - just be warned of the risks involved, and be prepared to put out a huge effort and maybe not see much return. If you''re up for it, I wish you good luck; the industry needs more people with the insanity to tackle this kind of challenge just to learn a few things.