Saturday, September 12

Geek

Mirage-11

I haven't worked out many details of this one just yet, except that it's going to be a response to the Imagine.  Everywhere that the Imagine is limited because it only has 10 bits, the Mirage is going to jump in with both feet.  And 11 bits.  Mostly with 11 bits, in fact.

Any feature I kind of want to put into the Imagine but reject because it is unreasonable goes into the Mirage.  It will hypothetically have come out a couple of years later - say, 1986 - so that I have more transistors to play with and can get away with more nonsense.
  • It will use fast external SRAM for colour lookup, with a total of 2048 registers.  You can freely select a palette of 2048 colours from a total of 2048, just because.
  • Standard 256k each of system RAM and VRAM, expandable to 512k, and with later memory chips, to as much as 2M, just because.
  • Fast page mode DRAM that can run for a full page, not just for two-word bursts, for up to double the VRAM bandwidth, just because.
  • Two 1.8M floppy drives, one on either side of the wedge-shaped case, just because.
  • Multi-threaded CPU / DSP.  The Imagine's CPU and DSP chips are effectively merged into one device running twice as fast, with multiple hardware threads and cycle-level scheduling.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:37 PM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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