TurboRez news update

[jlee@Bonnie.ICS.UCI.EDU ("Joseph T. Lee")]

This was passed along from a friend of mine here...

Date:     Fri, 14 May 93 14:10:36 PDT
From:     fhu@Bonnie.ics.uci.edu
Subject:  TurboRez
To:       jlee@Bonnie.ics.uci.edu
To:
Message-ID:  <9305141410.aa10788@Bonnie.ics.uci.edu>
Status: RO


Joseph, you might be interested in this...

 __________________________________________________

  TurboRez GS  ( A status report from RezTek)
 __________________________________________________

 A WORK IN PROGRESS...

  Here it is, April of '93 already. So, what's the status of TurboRez GS ?
Well, despite our appearance at the Apple Expo East in Boston last year and
the
fact that 6 months has passed since then, we're still not ready to ship our
product. But the project has not died, it's merely been delayed a bit. What
happened? Read on...

  In late January, we confirmed our booth at the Expo west. Previous to that,

lot of time had been spent debugging the toolset software and the modifying
the
present hardware (to incorporate a 640 by 256 color mode and a dual-plane
overlay mode). About the middle of February the bad news came: An industry-
wide shortage of surface mount chips had become much worse than it had been,
even in 1992. The present version of TurboRez uses a variety of these same
chip-types. Yup...uh-oh ! It's common to be quoted shipping dates a year or
more down the line for these parts (if you can get a quote at all). A small
company like RezTek is the last to the watering trough in a situation like
tis.

  So, a hard decision had to be made: We're doing a redesign of the product to
eliminate the parts in question. This has the primary effect of avoiding any
reliance on chips that may prove to be impossible to get over the next couple
of years. We'll be compressing most of the circuitry down into a custom chip
(whose availability, at this point, is much more dependable). A side benfit of
this redesign will be an enhanced product while at the same time keeping the
price stable. The custom chip approach allows for the inclusion of features we
couldn't manage on the original version.

 WHAT TO LOOK FORWARD TO...

  > Increased Onboard Memory: Up in the 1 megabyte range.

  > Blitter w/Decompression: A high speed blitter (8-10 mhz)
     with built-in decompression capability for fast draw-
      ing combined with economical memory usage.

  > Enhanced Multi-Plane: The ability to overlay 3-4 simul-
     taneous image planes. Each plane is independent of the
      others (i.e. writing to one doesn't bother the others)

  > Display List Co-Processor: This feature will allow the
      TurboRez hardware to follow a display list (or sript)
      contained in its onboard memory. This list can alter
      display resolution, image source addresses, start/stop
      the blitter and other such actions completely indepen-
      dent of the GS's Cpu. (You could, for instance, have
      Turborez doing an animated sequnce while the GS was
      busy accessing a disk drive)

  > 400 Line Support: At this time, it looks like we'll be
      able to support an interlaced 400 line mode on stock
      monitors. (and in the future, possibly VGA-type moni-
      tors via a small adaptor...maybe)

 STAY TUNED....

  As you might suspect, all of this is going to take some time. We anticipate

minimum of 5 months till completion.

 ____________________________________________________________

  RezTek
  2301 Cotton Ct
  Santa Rosa, Ca 95401
  707-573-9257
 ____________________________________________________________

Joseph
--
jlee@bonnie.ics.uci.edu  | Onion (gravity) rings are | Temporal distortion is
                         | the fabric of space.      | just your imagination.