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3D worlds

Hello I have finally got through around 1mb of misc mail with all the good 
stuff I missed.

Catching up on the last couple of months (3D down furthure):

I can hardly remember what was being talked about a couple of months ago, 
but a easy target for an up and running Misc system would be to use PC 
hardware.  Variouse PC boards are available down to approx 2 by 1 inch and 
could be used as an I/O and display server.  The busses that could be used 
include PCI, ISA, IDE and firewire. A 386 server could be sent display 
command, video, or compressed video and i/o commands to the server to 
establish a misc system for forth users.

It was suggested that a system be designed with 
floppy/serial/parralel/keyboard etc ports. By the time such a board was 
designed devices that use Firwire (50Mbytes/s pluss), USB (1 and a bit MB 
per second) and Bluetooth (wireless radio interface supported by Mobile 
Phone manufacturers instead of infrared) will be available.  So a design to 
use these new interfaces would probably be simpler in hardeware terms  
(Optical firewire will hit 400Mbytes per second and wireless firewire a over 
128Mbytes per second).

Somebody asked about serial flash beyond 1MB in size, I believe National has 
a cheap and sucessful board level serial bus and they announced something 
like 4MB (or was that 4Mb) sized chips a few years ago.

I believe there are nich markets for the chips out there.  An intergrated 
WP(with printer)/Internet/Java machine/storage would supply most of non 
computer literates needs at a low cost (except the Playstation).  VGA 
Monitors (particularly secondhand) are so cheap that TV's virtually are not 
needed anymore.

Another idea I have been thinking of is to add a chip to a small colour 
handheld, there are a number of game units out there.  For instance the GB 
has a 65000+ colour 320*280 screen from Sharp. If (I haven't looked)it has 
the normal RGB colour cell structure then it should be possible to get 
960*280 Black text(with white background) resolution by using each colour 
cell, enough for web browsing.  There is a GB developement Web ring out 
there with hardware and programming specs for the old Black and White GB at 
the moment.

3d stuff, what I have been wanting to discuss for months is about what 
FPU/INteger requirements are need for 3D, and I think some of you 3d types 
out there might be able to help me.

If somebody was to make a say, 320*280, 16-bit colour 3D games machine what 
processing power would you require.  I have read in a 3dfx faq that 
suggested 80Million Polygons per second (though this could be a miss-quote 
from Pixa's 80M per frame).  Assuming it is per second, given 4000*4000*25 
frames per second we get 5 pixels per polygon.  So 320*280/5 is around 
600,000 full featured polygons persecond (allready surpassed by 3d 
accelerators.  Now the new Playstation can produce around 34 million fully 
featured polygons per second for 7.2 G/flops.  Which adds upto approximately 
200 million floating point opperations per 1 million pollygons, or around 
120 million for 600,000 polygons.  How realistic are these figures, for you 
guys who know the calculations, and how can we archieve them in misc, or can 
we use another more integer based methord?


Wayne Morellini


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