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From: izumi@fugitive.berkeley.edu (Izumi Ohzawa)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: NeXTdimension board - multiple heads on a cube?
Message-ID: <1990Sep29.014531.29762@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 29 Sep 90 01:45:31 GMT
References: <50958@brunix.UUCP> <1990Sep25.171544.5774@zoo.toronto.edu> <51552@brunix.UUCP>
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In article <51552@brunix.UUCP> rca@cs.brown.edu (Ronald C.F. Antony) writes:
>
>CLUT-animation may by a nice toy, but it is a hack. Put in some more i860 if
>necessary and do REAL animation. However, if the NeXT is able to have real-
>time videos running from the hard-disk, it should be possible to animate what
>ever you want without CLUT-animation-hacks.
>

There are certain thing you can't do.  That's when hacks
have to come in no matter how ugly they could be.
The spec of the NeXTdimension board says that the i860's
"full screen clear time" is 30 msec.  That's TWO frames.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
You just can't move 24(32)-bit deep Mega pixels around in
less than a frame period.
I don't think adding more i860's will help this, and
they have to be on another board anyway.

I know this is a hack.  I wan't exactly expecting DPS to hanle CLUT
animation.  It will probably break it.  I am, however, hoping
that the low-level software allows us to sneak in a little
program onto i860 to fiddle with CLUTs in a way which co-exists
with DPS interpreter.  Essentially, like the X windows system
somebody announced recently on the net.

I understand that most people wound not need to touch LUTs.
And that's true for me too while I work with standard graphics
programs such as TopDraw, Icon, etc.

The board hardware is a damn good graphics system by itself.
Especially at that price.
Even a stupid IBM AT boards with TMS34020 can cost similarly.
(1280x1024x24bits, non-interlaced).
I was just drooling over the possibility of having the best
of both worlds: Color DPS and Top-class graphics hardware.
Even without Color DPS, it's a nice board.


Izumi Ohzawa, izumi@violet.berkeley.edu