RE: PC Vector generator card... (and ESB update)

> >Hmmmmm. I think I see what you mean. You could probably just have
> the
> >DSP sit there in a busy-loop watching for new values to appear from
> the
> >PC and grab 'em as soon as they show up.
>
> I think that would work beautifully.
>
Ahhh, good, 'cause I think that's the first one I'll try. It'll
actually work as-is on the demo board. I'll just use the left channel on
the CODEC as the X channel and the right one as the Y. Might not have
enough bandwidth for full speed operation though...

> >The good part is that the design is effectively "soft". The hardware
> is
> >just the DSP and the D/A's so you can actually change how it works
> long
> >after the hardware is working... As long as the game doesn't display
> >more than about 4000 vectors at once you could just treat data RAM as
> a
> >line-list.
>
> 4000! Geeze! I think that's plenty! I put a counter in my emulator
> just to
> see how many vectors were being drawn per refresh. Sundance came in
> the highest
> at 457!
>
> I'm sure 4000 vectors of any size are beyond the capabilities of even
> the Sega
> monitor.
>
The only reason 4000 sticks in my mind is that I think that number came
 from Neil when he was working on Star Wars. Something about the death
star explosion causing him some grief in EMU at first 'cause he wasn't
expecting the sheer number of vectors. Maybe he was speaking
figuratively though... I suppose it's possible to figure out-- Star
Wars has 6K words of VRAM, no? What's the fewest number of bytes for a
vector in Atari Analog Vector Generator-speak? (Where's C3PO when you
need him...)

-Clay
Received on Tue Mar 24 16:45:57 1998