*** The LAST HYDRA Blowout Sale -- 10 Year Anniversary ***
AndreL
Posts: 1,004
in Propeller 1
There are only 4 HYDRAs left in stock! This product helped launch the Propeller chip, and many nights were spent asking Chip 1000's of questions about the Propeller to generate the documentation for the Propeller itself and use the information to build a "fun, educational platform" to show off the Propeller chip. At the time is was a huge project for myself and Parallax, the book alone pushing 800 pages was the source of many sleepless nights for Stephanie Lindsay editing it, as well as the packaging for the product to mimic the Atari 2600 VHS. And the whole project from my first conversation with Ken Gracey to done had to be around 6 months, talk about sleepless nights!
The HYDRA Kit was the result, and after a decade and 1000's of units sold, there are 4 left
But, to help them out the door on their journey, I am including all the expansion cards that were built with the HYDRA including:
1. 128K Memory Card (comes with kit).
2. Experimenters Card (comes with kit).
3. HYDRA EtherX Add-On Card ($59.95 value).
4. HYDRA SD Max Storage Card ($49.95 value).
5. HYDRA XTREME 512K SRAM Card ($59.95 value).
Also, we will throw in an additional NES controller, so each kit has 2.
The price of the bundle is the same price as the HYDRA Kit $199.95 -- it can be found on my iC0nstrux.com site here:
HYDRA at iC0nstrux
To get the bundle in checkout, simply add "THE LAST HYDRA" code in the comments, and we will put everything in the box.
Of course, this begs the question, will their be more HYDRAs? Not sure -- I have always wanted to do a HYDRA 2, but we will see if that ever makes sense.
Lastly, a little piece of history. When the Propeller chip was done, there was no documentation on it, so as I said Chip and I got together for a few days, and I took countless notes on the processor, named many parts of its internals, and then wrote an internal document for my Demo coders and Parallax engineers on how the chip worked to get them started. I think after 10 years, everything said in here has been said elsewhere and most of this was copied into the HYDRA Book, but those of you that really love the Propeller might find this piece of history interesting since its the first complete programming manual on the Propeller used to train the internal Parallax engineers and get them excited about what the Propeller could do
File link below:
De Re HYDRA 2.1
Andre'
The HYDRA Kit was the result, and after a decade and 1000's of units sold, there are 4 left
But, to help them out the door on their journey, I am including all the expansion cards that were built with the HYDRA including:1. 128K Memory Card (comes with kit).
2. Experimenters Card (comes with kit).
3. HYDRA EtherX Add-On Card ($59.95 value).
4. HYDRA SD Max Storage Card ($49.95 value).
5. HYDRA XTREME 512K SRAM Card ($59.95 value).
Also, we will throw in an additional NES controller, so each kit has 2.
The price of the bundle is the same price as the HYDRA Kit $199.95 -- it can be found on my iC0nstrux.com site here:
HYDRA at iC0nstrux
To get the bundle in checkout, simply add "THE LAST HYDRA" code in the comments, and we will put everything in the box.
Of course, this begs the question, will their be more HYDRAs? Not sure -- I have always wanted to do a HYDRA 2, but we will see if that ever makes sense.
Lastly, a little piece of history. When the Propeller chip was done, there was no documentation on it, so as I said Chip and I got together for a few days, and I took countless notes on the processor, named many parts of its internals, and then wrote an internal document for my Demo coders and Parallax engineers on how the chip worked to get them started. I think after 10 years, everything said in here has been said elsewhere and most of this was copied into the HYDRA Book, but those of you that really love the Propeller might find this piece of history interesting since its the first complete programming manual on the Propeller used to train the internal Parallax engineers and get them excited about what the Propeller could do
File link below:De Re HYDRA 2.1
Andre'
Comments
Thanks for the link. That is an interesting piece of history!
David
Tom
-Tor
Thanks again Andre!
The manual is ~800 pages. That's a big part of the weight. Oh, but, what a manual!
Absolutely! Lots of great information in there!
I didn't use my Hydra a lot but I sure learned a lot from the manual.
We will see what the future holds for the "HYDRA" brand, "HYDRA 2" or maybe something else, but I WILL build another "HYDRA" at some point. It's too cool of a name to not use again
Additionally, I might build an al a carte HYDRA 1.1 with just the PCB, on a smaller board, no keyboard, mouse, controller, etc. But, the NES connector is a problem for one thing, I had a source for them, and I think we bought 10-20K units, I think parallax had 10,000 of them, I had a few K, but I would have to track those down in china probably.
Anyway, we will see what happens
Andre'
I still have the XGameStation. :-)
And I still have many of your books from the glorious (not joking) DOS programming days (and some Windows 9x game dev).
I look forward to any new projects.
One project I would love to see is a "Video Generation using the Propeller for Dummies". Perhaps a book that teaches us how to integrate a Propeller into a vintage computer. Anyway...just an idea.
https://www.parallax.com/downloads/hydra-manual
http://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/chameleon-avr-8-bit-system#.VzOfKmM9PVk
http://www.ic0nstrux.com/products/gaming-systems/chameleon-pic-16-bit-system#.VzOfSmM9PVk
According to Andre':
But, the "HYDRA" will make a come back in some form -- I promise
Andre'
That's very good to hear. It's a great card.
LOL
"HYDRA" is too good a name or partial name to leave idle. I installed and looked after many "HYDRAGAMMA' multiwell gamma counters in numerous laboratories over the years. Hard to forget a name like that.
During the development I remember I was showing the Hydra to some friends. I showed them some of the programs the other programmers made (the Alien jet fighter game, the Dr Mario type game, and some of the graphics demos) and then I showed them the breakout/arkanoid game I made. Well my friends were less than impressed with what I was working and wanted to see the other demos. This annoyed me a little bit, but ultimately they were right that my program, though I felt was solid, wasn't as impressive. This is when I took to making X-Racer.
Ultimately I got lucky as there was little planning and just threw what I though would work without regard to memory limits. Mentally I had a worst case, moderate case, best case scenario of what I could throw at it. Including the road rendering worst case was three onscreen objects (including the player car) moderate case was about 8 and best case was 12. I was able to hit moderate case without running out of cycles and losing sync on the rendering. I first started off by ripping apart one of the graphics drivers by Remz (which at the time broke the 4 color limit barrier and freed up memory by not needing to use a frame buffer). How the rendering worked was I used the built in font (to save memory) at the top for text, a single tiled graphic for the sky, and special line fill routine for road, with a lot of the road precaculated. I also had scaled sprites which I think I limited to 7 or 8, but was really limited to the amount of COGs you threw at it. For a while I used the car from the PCEngine version of Outrun as a place holder until I made my own car and dropped it in the game. I also had a friend of mine make a song for it in the last week or two I was working on it. All in all I was happy with it, though I didn't realize how difficult the game was until I saw other people play it. Two lanes at high speed and a procedurely generated track with sharp turns and slow cars has a high difficulty level.
The best part was after the release was the community that sprung up around it in the Hydra forums. Since the Hydra was essentially a bare bones propeller chip with some accessories people could build units similar and create their own software that was compatible. The Hydra forums on here were very active and many people came by to show off their games and skills. It was a sad day when Parallax shut that down lumped it into the general forums. After that, any games anyone made was lost in fray and the community ultimately died there.
Congratulation Andre!
Here one of my first post that I published 8 years ago...
forums.parallax.com/discussion/100163/santa-hydra-and-3d-game-programming
I am following you on your fb group
https://facebook.com/groups/embedded.robotic.systems/
Thanks
Gianni
So "De Re Propeller" = "All About Propeller"
Good Wikipedia article about De Re Atari:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Re_Atari
And De Re Atari was a legend at the time. And remember, no internet, no nothing, so the ONLY way to get the book was to get a copy of it, and it was REALLY hard -- But, when I was 12-13 years old, something like that, I went around asking neighbors to mow their lawn. I mowed a neighbor 2 houses over and he said come in while he gets the money, and I was standing in the kitchen, I saw an 800, and I started commenting about it-- he worked at atari, was a VP of something, and then I was like REALLY? He showed me games, and some docs including De Re Ray, and gave me a copy of that and a couple other "technical" manuals, I took them home and read them over and over -- so of course, I had to use that name about the HYDRA internals
http://forums.parallax.com/discussion/164043/the-p8x-game-system
https://dev.maccasoft.com/propgame/
It was largely inspired by Hydra, even if I never had one.
That's pretty neat!
I plan to sell the PCBs only, at least initially.
The boards are not yet available, I just finished to test the video output connected to those VGA or SCART to HDMI converters and it works pretty well, I have to make a couple of minor adjustments then I can build a first batch of PCBs with the full silk and solder mask. It will take some more time to have them available.