CompuServe Messages

<<Sooo…you put a MIPS+memory on an ISA card, and put it in an Amiga. License Janus from CBM, so that there is some kind of talk between the MIPS card and the host Amiga. Allow the user to simply "send" a Lightwave scene to the card, and find frames on their hard drive…probably only load the absolutely necessary core of NT and the SoftScreamer to make it run. The card could have 16 megs on it, expandable to 32. Perhaps, at the most, also put an IDE controller plus drive to handle VM needs.>> Jonathan, Thanks for your input. Accelerator cards have been around in one form or another for several years, remember the intel 'Above Board?" Your idea is not bad, the technology is what's bad. The ISA bus is at best 8Mhz X 16-bits. Not a bottleneck when rendering in the local, on-add-in board memory, but hell to pay if it goes virtual. Further, by the time you put 32MB, IDE, processor, ROM, etc. on the card its cost is almost as much as a whole new motherboard. A motherboard with greater expandability and no slow bus between important peripheral devices ends up costing about the same. Plus, its easier to control the emissions within a box when you own the box. An add-in board running at 66Mhz with the logic complexity you described would likely not pass FCC A. And, if we believe that most users would put a card like this in a machine they own we would have to guarantee the FCC that these machines would not be used in the home even if it did pass FCC A. Okay, how many of you renderers work at home? Hands please. drp