Amusingly, open source devs are still hacking/improving HyperZ support in 2026. https://www.phoronix.com/news/ATI-R300-Occlusion-Query-Fix
The idea that we should ever allow companies to gate how we use hardware is a joke. The sustainability here is just wildly off the charts impressive. We as a species have blanket legal right to fix things we buy. Any legal monkeying that that from is us an affront to all of us, and if applicable whatever god or gods that made us.
There's no good reason to get emotionally attached to obsolete hardware unless you are running a museum or just doing something cool. AMD doesn't hack on a Radeon R100 for the same reason everyone else doesn't: it's obsolete. It makes more sense to get a modern bargain-bin $30 fanless graphics card than to make your R100 work in any modern computer.