Message-ID: <32C196A4.1C92@primary.net>
Date: Wed, 25 Dec 1996 15:03:32 -0600
From: Phillip Mueller <phil@primary.net>
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Organization: Medigo
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Subject: video game hacking/hardware design
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I'm Looking for people to team up with to design cutting edge video game
hardware for use in Console, PC, Arcade, Top Set Box, and the (MAC
eventually). The idea is to design a custom chip set for 2D/3D graphics
that wouldinclude the following features listed at the bottom of this
article.

I have been seeing a lot of postings requesting information on
programming the N64, Saturn, and playstation recently. However by the
time you got the info -- provided you can obtain it since nintendo and
all video game manufactures are so damn secrective-- and by the time you
design the interface hardware and development tools it would be easier
to design a system yourself.

After seeing the Microsoft Games SDK crank out 72-90 fps at 648x480 8
and 16 bit color with multiple layers on low cost video cards it became
apparent to me that if someone set out to design custom hardware for
this type of thing they could easily surpass anything on the market
today. 
After all its pretty sad that a $250 dollar game system can surpass a
$2000-$4000 PC. Besides programming Window API's suck and why do you
need windows when playing a game anyway. You could design a card and a
custom OS for the PC when you click on the games icon so you don't have
to worry about Windows 95 bogging down your game. All the development
software would run under dos or windows 95 and the chipset technology
would be licensed to board manufactures possibly.

I want to place a system into the PC that is equal to are better than
the Sega Model 3 board for Virtua Fighter 3 in the arcade.

Some of the 2D features:

1) collision detection hardware.
2) Sprite and Z-Buffering hardware.
3) High Speed Blitters with multiple sources and effects (VRAM > VRAM)
(SYSTEM RAM <> VRAM).
4) Rotation XYZ axis, Scaling, Alpha channeling.
5) Hardware support for Tile, Chunky Bitmap, and Bitplane graphics.
6) Hardware support for 4 to 6 layers of graphics.
7) Horizontal and Vertical interrupts.
8) On the fly color and resolution changes via interrupts (like Atari
and Amiga).
9) Sprites up to (256x256) with 24bit color and Alpha channeling
(transparency).

Some of the 3D features:

1)  High Resolution Anti-aliased Tri-Linear mip-mapped perspective
corrected texture mapping.
2)  On board polygon set-up.
3 ) Lod Mapping (level of detail managment).
4)  Hardware assited lighting and shadows.
5)  gouroud shaded and texture mapping.
6)  fogging, lighting, and depth cueing effects.
7)  palettized colors in hi-color and true color modes for color cycling
effects.
8)  Z-buffer with alpha channeling.
9)  Video Texture effects Via MPEG2 hardware assist.
10) Textured polygons in the 1.5 to 2.5+ million Range.
Additional features:

*Sound Hardware (possibly use Ensonique or Yamaha Chipset?)
*MPEG-2.
*overlays.
*audio/video streaming off CD (DVD?)
*DVD support.
*RAMBUS memory.
*expandable memory and 2D and 3D are on individual chips for
upgradability.
*32 bit graphics (24 true color - 8 bit alpha channel) up to 1280 x 1024
resolution.
* Registers and memory liner mapped in systems memory so you don't have
to use slow port addressing to       access hardware.

If interested email me at mike@darkcyde.com

thank you,
Michael Bazaillion
Darkcyde Entertainment Group
