Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
When one PLD just isn't enough
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Mr. Scram:
I always like the "money no object" type of equipment. Some will say it's unbecoming for an engineer not to have limitations imposed, but it's more like the state of the art becoming the limit. If you can find a way to make it happen, do so. Even if you know literally about the technologies involved, that board looks interesting.

The concept of creating volume purchases by simply using the same part many times is interesting too. ;D
dexters_lab:
Thanks fpgaarcade for a great insight into this card and how it works. There is a layer count on the board but IIRC it's under the little aluminium block that has the card name on (on the top left of the pic). 18 layers comes to mind, i'd have to open my Paintbox and take a look to confirm.

so, from what i can tell this was an upgrade to the C.A.P. card which enabled the 'Contour' features on various systems like Paintbox and HAL. Fpgaarcade, was the 'RAVE' card an upgrade to the Image card or is it something entirely different?

any idea what the rough cost would have been to someone who wanted one of these Image cards to upgrade their system? When i swapped out my regular Perspective card and put the Image card in place of it the system just recognised it and enabled all the options.
james_s:

--- Quote from: dexters_lab on April 09, 2018, 09:45:39 pm ---yep, as impressive as the quantel board is... i can certainly remember what my 3dfx voodoo could do at pretty much the same time and i could play quake on it!

--- End quote ---

I still remember the first time I saw Quake on a Voodoo card, I was blown away. Prior to that I had only ever seen software rendering which looked like absolute garbage in comparison. Suddenly that glassy smooth framerate, high resolution textures, light and shadows, it's hard to even imagine today how amazing that was at the time.
dexters_lab:

--- Quote from: james_s on December 29, 2018, 06:09:06 pm ---
--- Quote from: dexters_lab on April 09, 2018, 09:45:39 pm ---yep, as impressive as the quantel board is... i can certainly remember what my 3dfx voodoo could do at pretty much the same time and i could play quake on it!

--- End quote ---

I still remember the first time I saw Quake on a Voodoo card, I was blown away. Prior to that I had only ever seen software rendering which looked like absolute garbage in comparison. Suddenly that glassy smooth framerate, high resolution textures, light and shadows, it's hard to even imagine today how amazing that was at the time.

--- End quote ---

at the time the 3dfx voodoo arrived i was working for a software company and i remember after buying a Diamond Monster 3D  i was harassed by the rest of the developers to get it plugged into my work PC so we could all marvel at the graphics, it really was a sea change in the quality of the graphics, it re-wrote what was expected. Later i switched to dual Voodoo 2 which meant i could play QuakeWorld at 1024x768  ;D
fpgaarcade:
"Fpgaarcade, was the 'RAVE' card an upgrade to the Image card or is it something entirely different?"

Call me Mike! If I remember correctly the Rave card was done by Simon after the Image card. It's an audio processing board introduced with the external fader panel. It has a scsi controller for it's own disk where the audio was stored.

"any idea what the rough cost would have been to someone who wanted one of these Image cards to upgrade their system? When i swapped out my regular Perspective card and put the Image card in place of it the system just recognised it and enabled all the options."

The board also served as a hardware dongle for the software, so the price covered the hardware and software options. £25-30K apparently. Remember these machines were rented out by the hour. The card would have paid for itself very quickly due to the reduced rendering time and extra feature set.
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