Picasso IV - what can it do that the other cards can not?

[alexh]

I paid £150 for one in Feb this year. I dont think that was too expensive.

I mean for what it is, a 4Mbyte PCI gfx card it is outrageous but it's for an Amiga and they didn't make millions of them.

[alexh]

Crisisdog wrote:
4.  The Picasso IV had add-on options, although very rare.  There was a very limited production of a 3D daughtercard with a 3DFX VooDoo chip for use with the very few games out that require 3D acceleration.

Not true. The ParaGlide (the name for this addon) was never made. Another planned but never made addon was a hardware MPEG decoder (cant remember it's name, if it ever had one)

Crisisdog wrote:
There was also supposed to be some AHI compatible sound card attachment and TV Tuner card.

Concierto = AHI Sound card
Paloma = PAL TV Tuner
Pablo = Video Encoder

All were made in limited numbers.

http://sophisticated-development.de/software/index.php

[alexh]

They were expensive at $360 USD. No-one would have paid $700+ USD as you could get a Mediator, a Voodoo 3 and an Indivision 1200 for less!

[alexh]

Crisisdog wrote:
I could have sworn I saw several posts many years ago somewhere from several happy individuals who finally got some sort of 3DFX VooDoo add-on for the Picasso-IV card.

I am 90% sure that nothing was ever made. The project was announced in July 99. They had not even started doing the design in June 2000 as it said on their website they were looking for a designer to start the PCB layout. Klaus Burkert, father of the Picasso family, died in April 2001 and with him went any chance of Village Tronic making anything Amiga ever again.

Also there is no sign of any Voodoo 1 drivers for the Amiga in any form (Mediator / Prometheus)

Only MastaTabs aka Tobias Seiler knows for sure.

[alexh]

T3000 wrote:
If I remember correctly, the PIV retailed for something like $1200 when released. The PIV was released 1997. I could be way wrong about the $1200 price tag.

Here is a review of the PIV in Feb 1997, which as a few weeks after launch. The price is $439

http://de4.aminet.net/docs/rview/PicassoIV.txt

[alexh]

jimbo100 wrote:
Worth a lot more now!!  :-D

It would seem so. But I'd be amazed if the bidders on that auction actually pay out once they come to their senses.

LoadWB wrote:

alexh wrote:
Klaus Burkert, father of the Picasso family, died in April 2001 and with him went any chance of Village Tronic making anything Amiga ever again.

How/why is that?  Is he the only one who knew the system that well?

I do not know all the details. I'm not even sure he was still working at / contracted to VT at the time of his death. It could just be a coincidence that VT pulled all development at that date.

Klaus was one of the older members of VT, the driving force behind Amiga development and once he was gone, I am sure it would have been the excuse VT needed to cancel all expensive, non profitable Amiga hardware production.

[alexh]

LoadWB wrote:
Potential opportunity for Individual Computers or E3B?

Maybe. Unfortunately perhaps a little late for A1200 owners. I tried to convince Jens to include an FPGA capable of being a gfx card in the Indivision but he (quite rightly) said he wasn't interested in overcoming the associated problems and that a top quality scandoubler was all the public wanted.

[alexh]

Scary stuff. That was the last WoA I ever went to. It was sh!te compared to years gone by. More of a car boot sale.

I used my position at Argonaut software to get into the closed doors developers meetings where I met people from Vulcan and a few others. Anyhow the Amiga guys were assholes. Their tech guy, an indian man, who seemed to be so knowledgeable in general conversation, knew almost nothing about Amiga architecture and even less about hardware design and FPGA's.

In the meeting they were bullsh!ting that they had a 400MHz 3D accelerator architecture in development to rival 3DFX and nVidia and what they actually had was a development board from a 3rd party company called... what were they called... something... brothers?? Bros? (no not bitmap).... Baltic / Scandinavian company cannot remember but their designs never got made. I recognised the photos from the web instantly embarrassing several of the Amiga execs in conversation.

[alexh]

bloodline wrote:
Were you involved with the SuperFX chip dev?

I worked in that dept. But I was still at school when the SuperFX was designed 1991. When I was at Argonaut in 1997/8 I worked in the ARC department (which was the new name for the SuperFX). http://www.arc.com

I got to meet some cool people there including all the original SuperFX team. I got to play on the unreleased StarFox 2 (because the finished source code + binaries were lying around on the network) and I got countless devkits & manuals from yesteryear because halfway through my time at Argonaut they moved offices and threw everything that was not current away. PSOne, Saturn, SNES, Amiga, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, 3DO, Archimedes all recovered during the longest skip-dive event in history! (3 days!)

zipper wrote:
Bitboys, Glaze3D (finnish) - I think there was some ideas that have been used further in 3D chip development.

Yup that was it. "Bitboys Oy". You've got a better memory than I. I dunno if they ever admitted that was the design Amiga Inc. intended to license but it was obvious.

I dunno if Bitboys had announced anything publicly at the time but Argonaut had been sent a demo board with FPGA samples running at a very low frame rate and a VHS cassette tape of what it could do (DVD-video didnt exist at the time)