- Joe
-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Coward <dcoward@pressstart.com>
To: baccl@retronet.net <baccl@retronet.net>
Date: Tuesday, February 23, 1999 11:44 AM
Subject: OT ramblings
> Remember on the Apple II and later on the IBM if you
>wanted to draw a sprite, you had to save the background
>behind the sprite before you drew it, so you could restore
>it when the sprite moved or disppeared?
> And then machines like the C64 had sprite hardware. You could
>draw 8 sprites at a time. And if you set up raster interrupts
>you could get more than 8 on the screen at a time.
>
> Well, today I'm just about to start another project. Dreamcast
>this time. We're still waiting for the development systems to
>arrive (next week maybe). The machines themselves will be out
>next Christmas. Dreamcast is powered by a 200Mhz SH4 and a
>Floating Point Unit. 1.4 billion floating-point operations
>per second and 1 million polygons per second.
> The current Big Boy on the block is the VooDoo3 board for the
>PC. 8 million flat, shaded polygons per second and thats with
>full effects on (like lighting, fog, etc.)
>
> Today I found some specs for the Playstation2 on the web.
> It should be out Christmas 2000.
> One CPU with a dedicated floating-point unit, and two vector processing
>units, all working in parallel that they are
>calling the "Emotion Engine".
> They claim it will calculate and draw 55 MILLION polygons/second!
>30 million with effects on.
>
>This is one of the reasons why I collect computers.
>
>I've been talking to Richard Erlacher the past couple
>of days. He can't understand why so many people would be
>interest in his DAZZLER boards "since they only have a
>resolution of 128x128". I don't know if I did a very
>good job of explaining it to him.
>--Doug
>=========================================
>Doug Coward
>Press Start Inc.
>Sunnyvale,CA
>=========================================
>