Re: a quick thought...

[chrisw@eagle.ais.net (Chris Wicklein)]

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

	I think this was an early design feature of the Zip accelerator 
removed in later boards.  Such a combination would be nice for drawing 
code, but wouldn't help bit-mapped graphics nearly as much.  I think the 
SecondSight could be used in a similar manner by coding for the Z180 on 
board.  One could display a nice, useful mode like 640x480x256 and have 
RAM free for drawing code in the video RAM (I think this is possible, but 
I don't have my board yet...).  The 65816 would only have to issue calls 
to the SS board with parameters and such.

--
Christopher Wicklein (chrisw@ais.net)
<A HREF="http://www.cl.ais.net/chrisw";>Chris's homepage</A>

"You'd be molten."