| Subject: RE: Ideas on new Atari |
Author: earx (alinga.sron.nl)
Date: 03-14-2005 12:42
their current test board is based on the old coldfire evaluation board. Indeed, no MMU. But their final design will use the latest coldfire.
their current test video card is a Matrox PCI one, not the S3. and it's written in the documentation available from the acp site. and the eye can see more than the 24 bit color in some cases because of the logarithmic brightness perception of the human visual system and the higher sensitivy to the green component. </pedant> ;) it would be nice to see if the 30 bits work.. on the other hand 8 bit alpha channel could be more useful ;) but either way, alpha is only useful for fancy stuff or games/demos. 30 bit is only useful for precision graphical work. so very specific niches.
for supervidel specifics you need to ask the developers (see nature.atari.org). there will be a blitter on this card i believe, although there are only rumours on the 3d side of things. in any case, the 2D could be fast but the 3D speed of modern ATI/NVIDIA cards is of course extremely hard to match. anyway, fast 3D would imply big power consumption, fans, heatsinks (which you and i don't like).
i have no idea about the current status of the project on the 56K side.. yes, there is an existing code base including mod replayers, jpeg/mpeg decoders, many real-time filters, spectral analysis, etc. the 56K series has gone a long way and there is plenty of example code.
by now the 56301 is indeed outdated. there are follow-ups which as twice as fast and have special hardware filter blocks. maybe they will decide to use these. or maybe they can go for an off-the-shelf chip sets..
i think it's decent that they develop on a non-commercial basis. doing this as a commercial project is a -big- risk, in the worst case leaving developers with big debts and unwilling to do future atari-related projects. if it were to be commercial then they'd need to get a deal from steinberg or other bigshots in the music/multi media world. no way to get a stable existance otherwise.
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