PropGFX in action
Baggers
Posts: 3,019
Here's some action from the 256 colour mode ( 128x96 )
It's early stages yet, but I've added Poly draw functionality in there too, I've not double buffered the screen as of yet, so there's scope for a LOT more poly's to be drawn as there's no tearing in this at all.
PS, don't worry, I know there's no poly sort yet, that's cos it's not written yet, as that is the next thing that's going into it,·I just needed to post some progress
Follow link for vid of it in action.
http://www.propgfx.co.uk/forum/Blah.pl?m-1194213458/
·
It's early stages yet, but I've added Poly draw functionality in there too, I've not double buffered the screen as of yet, so there's scope for a LOT more poly's to be drawn as there's no tearing in this at all.
PS, don't worry, I know there's no poly sort yet, that's cos it's not written yet, as that is the next thing that's going into it,·I just needed to post some progress
Follow link for vid of it in action.
http://www.propgfx.co.uk/forum/Blah.pl?m-1194213458/
·
Comments
I've been iching to post my progress as well lately.
Still I can think of some very useful ideas that can make good use of this new feature.
I'm happy with the progess so far, and yes, I can see lots of uses for this too [noparse]:)[/noparse]
What is your present limit in a pure gray scale?
Rich
Do you mean as in grey colours? ie, output from the display? then it's 32 grey's, cos it's 15bit RGB, 5 bits Red,5 bits Green and 5 bits Blue, or with a little extra wiring, it can be 32768 scales, by re-wiring the outputs to a single r2r ladder, and to phono lead, and and not sending the colour burst, but I doubt a tv would pick up the 32k grey scales.
If that's not quite what you meant, then please re-phrase your question [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Baggers.
I'm curious as to the division of labor between the PropGFX and the host. Who does what? What kind of data gets transferred between them?
Yeah, was wondering when someone would ask that question [noparse];)[/noparse]
It's simply a poly drawer on the propgfx side, the hybrid side just sends the pre-rotated ( and eventually sorted ) data, as a list of 7 WORDs per poly.
A WORD controller for Set Screen Base, and one for clear screen, then all the data for the poly's Colour, X1,Y1, X2,Y2, X3,Y3, and finally a terminate WORD. [noparse]:)[/noparse]
So there's not really much needed to be send, you could even make a stream of data to be done, like the original ST and GBA versions of the oxygene demos were done. and just feed in the poly lists per frame from SD, wouldn't be much data to be streamed as a poly can fill a big area, also keeps ram for Screen [noparse]:)[/noparse]
The Money For Nothing video was more data transfer intense, sending 12K yet that it read from SD, that was uber fast transfering to PropGFX, as it's not double buffered PropGFX side and doesn't tear [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Comms between props is 2control bits and 8 data bits for speed.
Baggers.
Good job modifying the wire-frame version of the Propeller Hat Trick! Once you get the poly sorting down I would love to see that in action!
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Beau Schwabe
IC Layout Engineer
Parallax, Inc.
Post Edited (Beau Schwabe (Parallax)) : 11/6/2007 1:57:09 AM GMT
That's neat. When I was in graduate school, the computer department had just gotten a fancy graphics controller that would do shaded polygons on 3-D surfaces in space and then translate and rotate them. There were maybe 2 or 3 in the country. It took about 8 full rack panels of hardware let alone the processing power to feed it the polygon lists. Now (like with so many things), it takes just a couple of square inches of board space to do the same thing. The first demo was the USS Enterprise from Star Trek in coarse polygons doing its zoom into warp drive and you could change your vantage points and sun angle on repeats.
Yeah, that's next on the list, didn't get to do any last night as it was Bonfire night, so I was doing a little firework display for my girls [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Mike,
Enjoyed your story, and yeah, everything used to take up soooo much space, the demo sounds like a cool demo too [noparse]:)[/noparse] It's amazing how small things are getting, who knows what the prop2 will be capable of, I can't wait to put it through it's paces.
You really dated yourself.
When I was a kid playing with my C128, I used to think that the best hackers (programmers) were young, 20 tops. Boy was I wrong, and you are proof. Thanks for all you do, especially FemtoBasic,
Wow Baggers,
Your propGFX has got me thinking of a 4 chip hybrid type of setup with each chip connected via 10IO's to it's neighbor in a square. Of course, it would leave only 12 I/Os per prop, but with 48 I/Os,128KB, hub ram, and 32cogs total. Which leads me to a question. Of course, I would rather have a prop2, but me thinks it will be a ways off.
What is the highest bandwidth you have gotten on your connection, and how fast do you have to feed frame buffer to generating pixels. I was thinking it might be possible to use double buffering using the hub memory from 2 props. Odd frames local, and even frames from neighboring prop, or something like that.
Thanks,
Doug
If you really want throughput to ALL your props, then I'd go with one Master, and 3 slaves, 2 Video, and 1 Audio, each with same 8data bits, but each having their own 2 control bits to the main prop, yes, it'd use 14 IO's, but you could have the Audio handling Joypads also, which would get back your 4 extra comms pins, as for the highest bandwidth, I haven't tested it to the max, but will do when I get some time to do so [noparse]:)[/noparse]
Baggers.