Re: a quick thought...

[jefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

justin@mailhost.ecn.uoknor.edu (Justin Thiesen) wrote:

>I was looking through my old Apple magazines the other day, and
>all of a sudden, this idea popped in my head...

>Much of the trouble with upgrading the video hardware of the GS has
>to do with the fact that data still has to run through the 1 Mhz
>bus.  At the same time, however many GS owners have an accelator
>card of some variety.  If you could somehow combine the two, you'd
>have a killer product - maybe one of the 20 Mhz 65816's + accelerated
>video hardware.  Perhaps you could set it up so it would read the
>Quickdraw roms into a static cache at boot time, or something...

>Hmmm.  Probably impractical, but a nice dream, no?

Well, my original musing for designing a video card for the IIgs was
to have a microprocessor of some type (I was thinking of a DSP at the
time) for controlling the video hardware and writing an init to load
all the QuickDraw II commands into the card or keep them in an EPROM
or something.  This would give very quick drawing of a lot of the
standard things on the desktop.

I was even thinking of writing some 3-D routines to release as an
add-on.

As a bonus, I could have also written an init to patch the Integer and
SANE toolsets to use the DSP to do all the math operations very
quickly.

To get around the 1 Mhz bus problem, I was toying with the idea of
using the memory expansion slot for the video card and add a
piggy-back slot for any memory card you might have had.
Unfortunately, you would be able to fit a memory card with a
piggy-back slot on in into the video card but the video card could
probably be set up with SIMM sockets for 4 MB anyways.

I'd still love to build this thing but I'm still plagued with the same
problems I was back when I first thought about this; lack of money,
equipment and time.