CompuServe Messages

[ continuation ] accelerator boards with an unprecedented upgrade path. Of course the mere existence of the EGS-110/24 also obsoletes all other (non-GVP) A2000 CPU accelerator boards, which do not have this (GVP-compatible) 32-bit expansion bus! The EGS-110/24 is available with either 4MB or 8MB of high performance Video RAM (VRAM) with 25ns serial access time. This VRAM framebuffer is directly mapped into the 32-bit address space of the 68030, 68EC030 or 68040 CPU on the Accelerator board and the full 8MB can therefore be directly (randomly) accessed by the CPU (just like normal, high performance 32-bit wide DRAM on the COMBO board itself). The size and direct addressability of the EGS-110/24's framebuffer allows multiple screens to be kept in memory including double or triple buffered high resolution screens, each with a color depth of up to 24 bits! Imagine exciting new applications such as animations or real 3D programs with LED glasses which display alternate frames for the left and right eye in resolutions such as 1024×768, 24-bit, 60Hz refresh rate (for each eye!), non-interlaced. Of course this assumes you have a monitor which is capable of displaying these high resolution frames at a rate of 120 per second!! [ From the data sheet, later on, I calculate the board is capable of more than 120 frames per second of full frame 24-bit video. For comparison, 120 frames per second implies that the board will paint the entire 32-bit SVGA sized (almost 4x as big as standard workbench – 640×400 overscanned) twice in a 60th of a second. The stock 32-bit A3000/25 can only paint a 4 color 640×400 screen once every 4/60ths of a second 🙂 And it is moving 4x768K as compared to 32K bytes. ] The custom designed VRAM controller circuitry of the EGS-110/24 uses a 64-bit interleaved internal architecture and is able to take full advantage of all modes (eg: page mode, maskwrites, blockwrites) of these high speed VRAMs. This allows blockwrites of up to 576 [ MORE ]