C128 was pretty much a scam. The computer itself was a trash can of disjointed parts put together from failed projects leftovers, and then Commodore decided to market it as an upgraded C64.
12,081 karma · joined March 23, 2017
no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering
>Mystique ... transparency lookup table
no alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering. "Transparency Lookup Table" was a corpo speak code for color keying and a checkerboard mask that would stipple half the texture on top of whatever was there before
> G200. These cards supported ... OpenGL ... use of an OpenGL to Direct3D wrapper which hurt performance
Hurt compatibility first, performance second. Proper OpenGL driver shipped long after 2000 when G200 was already obsolete
>G200 ... performance was good
Performance was good for last place in benchmarks https://web.archive.org/web/20240907223521/https://www.anand...
> it still couldn’t beat the Voodoo 2, but it was fairly competitive with the RIVA and S3 Savage 3D.
How could it be competitive with cards half its price? or cards 2x as fast at same price point?
MATROX G100 8MB $99 April 1998
MATROX MILLENNIUM G200 8MB $230 August 1998 https://assets.hardwarezone.com/2009/reviews/video/g200/g200.html
optional DVD Upgrade Module (Hardware MPEG2 decoder) for G100/G200 $79 April 1998
STB Velocity 128 4MB $129 June 1998
S3 Savage 3D ~$150
Creative Labs Graphics Blaster TNT 16MB $169 September 1998, $125 November 1998
Diamond Viper V550 16MB $200 September 1998
Creative Labs 3D Blaster VooDoo2 8MB $229 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release
Diamond Monster 3D II 8MB $249 June 1998 and dropping fast after TNT release
first real Matrox OpenGL driver shipped with G400 in 2000
maybe because they had limited support for many features?
>Millennium
no textures, alpha blending, transparency, bilinear filtering
>G400
slow but ok, but its predecessor G200 only got OpenGL driver 2 years later with release of G400
VW ran the numbers and realized they cant compete with Chinese $100K 2000HP EVs accelerating in 2.5 second and beating any supercar.
LLMs are fantastic at faking those
there was official source code release for 6502 port, why not match names from that one?
DSPs do that, Atari Jaguar, Sony PS2 and PS3 did, all the GPUs manually manage cache.
More than one task and you start a fight over resources, have to manage hierarchies, priorities, all the stuff that now happens automagically.
its like those people never learn
"The physical pinout of the DSP56001 is different from the DSP56002" https://digisolutions.de/downloads/Differences56001_56002.pd...
Buying new unproven workstation just to develop expansion cards to make it fast makes no sense when you can just buy off teh shelf fast SUN or SGI.
So all Next had to do was
1 Develop another set of ASICs for fully incompatible CPU bus in parallel and in secret
2 Develop another motherboard in parallel and in secret
3 Manufacture another motherboard in parallel and in secret
4 Port NextStep to another fully incompatible CPU arch in parallel and in secret
5 Kill all the developers involved so none of this ever came out
> accelerator, on an expansion card
graphics on expansion, accelerator on expansion, additional HDD, new color monitor, new OS. Sound like in your alternate reality NSA paid $6K a pop for 20000 magnesium boxes with new incompatible with anything NuBus backplane offering whole 3 free slots, so $2K per slot.
The only possibility is April 1989 announcement of 50 MHz versions of 68030/68882 and Clock Doubler circuit running CPU/FPU fast only when its not touching the bus. Afaik to this day this is the only way to OC Nexts.
https://68kmla.org/bb/threads/nextstation-clock-doubler.4979...
https://web.archive.org/web/20190722120829/https://www.nextc...
But this still pushes whole thing to ~1990. Would NSA get 20000 highly binned CPUs before actual volume production? Then there is absolute lack of evidence of even one such system ever surviving, and stuff does survive despite being classified, like Tempest IBM 5170s.
Graphics from Intel is much more believable, probably something that later became Intel i860 based NeXTdimension. But that would push whole story a couple years since Intel i860 released mid 1989.
nah, you were supposed to buy official Hint Books https://www.sierragamers.com/hint-books/ or call 0-700 tip line. This cruel design printed money.
Encode data in a way short ECC code dictated over the phone is enough to reconstruct one missing sector (2KB).
you destroy every retail disk a little
Panasonic (MKE) was pure pooled PIO and didnt even support Interrupts. Sony and Mitsumi do have DREQ/DACK pins so most likely did ISA 8bit DMA. ISA DMA is pretty terrible and slow (4.7MHz clock, steals CPU cycles for the duration of the byte transfer), barely enough for 2x CDROM. IDE PIO is better on 286 and up than ISA DMA thanks to nice dedicated REP INSW. Taking into account ISA limits transferring one CD sector should take no less than ~700-1000us.
While ISA SCSI and VLB controllers could do DMA, they rarely did with ISA 16MB memory limit and VLB compatibility worries. The one VLB IDE controller dlaiming to do DMA, Promise PDC20630, does MWDMA2 to the drive but with CPU manually pooling IO pins on the other side, total waste https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?p=1323789
TLDR: Talk of enabling DMA for your HDD and maybe even CDROM became common only somewhere around 1996, a good year into Intel shipping busmastering IDE controller in PIIX on Pentium boards (430FX and up). You had to put devices on separate IDE channels and hope everything is compatible and works.
try making an AUX directory, or CON file, or PRN
Install locates the damage and gives you code encoding locations. Over the phone You receive ECC code. No more magic keygens, pirates have to distribute whole multi megabyte games.