Re: MISC video spec (640x480 ?)

[Penio Penev <penev@xxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 25 Mar 1997, Wayne Steven MORELLINI - Wayne wrote:

> This is the same sport of suggestion I was thinking about when I was 
> talking about  doctoring the video signal to modulate sound onto it.
> 
> If we' re  going to get onto the subject of "just add a sound chip" 
> (as happened last time)

What happened last time is that it was pointed out that the NTSC video
signal does _not_ contain information about sound, so whatever you do to
it, and however you modulate it, no TV wit a/v jacks (versus RF antenna
jack) will produce any sound from the video jack.  For this you need to
connect an additional cable (for mono, or two additional for stereo) with
the audio signal on them. 

> then we would get  much better results on 
> those lines if we just added a video chip.  Further  still why not 
> just get an Arm 7xxxx series  all in one chip that does the lot, if  
> that was the case.

If you want to do sound with a second chip, this might be actually a
second P21, which can be extorted to sing via its video pin.  I don't know
yet how good you can make it, but word is that 10 bits at 22KHz mono is
definitely possible. You'll have to add DRAM, though. 

> Still I have  a practicle suggestion, if Jeff is thinking of 
> interfacing extra chips to the  F21.  The Neograph (www.neograph.com) 
> magic graph chip offers an 32-bit Vesa local  bus interface, 1 M-byte 
> on chip  dram and S-VGA chip ll in one.  Using  the on chip dram as 
> main memory it  should be possible to produce  an two chip computer 
> (pluss logic), I was actually thinking of using it on the P32 myself, 
> but it hasn't adventuated.

As Jeff pointed out, if you wanted to add many chips, this could be 3 F21s
to handle the R, G, and B, _and_ alleviate the memory bottleneck by doing
that.  Of course someone might say that F21 is somewhere between vaporware
nad pre-release, but we all know that soon the story will be different. 

> Further still to the chips from Silicon Graphics,  Phase 5 
> (www.phase5.de, or something) in Germany is producing a next  
> generation type Amiga (Abox), the heart chipset is  a 128-bit device  that 
> people think will  compete with the 02 graphics wise  (but we shall 
> wait and see),

By the time we get to wait and see, the O2 may be obsolete :-) 

And, the main O2 feature is not the stunning graphics, but the fact that
_while_ you render texture-mapped 3D at frame rates you still have
available 700MB/sec bandwidth between the memory and the processor, _and_
can decompress and play full frame full motion MJPEG from disk, _and_ you
can do 10MB/sec ftp, _and_ you can do CD-quality stereo audio in-out,
_and_ the machine be responsive in a shell.  While doing all of the above
simultaneously, you still haven't even touched the reserved 267MB/sec
bandwidth of the PCI64 bus, which isn't needed for any of the above. 

>  they are talking about a lower bus width version 
> becoming aavailable that might suit a P32 etc.  Otherwise some of the 
>   new "Amiga's" haave processor card slots.

The O2 has a PCI bus, unpopulated by default.

> Next  on the hit list is that Microsoft has apparently donee 
> something really cool.  They have invented a 3-D graphics standard 
> caalled Talsiman.  The claim looks like 1.5-2 million pixels per second 
> on a $300-$500 doller card.  

[ the microsoft processor]

> It had ghz clocks and mutiple 
> processors and the price tag was aimed at mass consumer electronics.

$300-$500 doesn't sound like consumer electronics to me.


--
Penio Penev <Penev@pisa.Rockefeller.edu> 1-212-327-7423