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

[Damion]

Congrats man, you really lucked out! :pint:

[ArcticSon]

For anyone who wanted to see the Amiga Inc. 1998 Amiga OS5
announcement coverage in Amazing Computing, or the vintage
SoftHut, etc. ads, I've scanned them into a PDF one can
download here...  (be mindful it is a 28Mbyte file).

Link

[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.

[bloodline]

alexh wrote:
Scary stuff. That was the last WoA I ever went to. It was {bleep}e 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 {bleep}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 the 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.

Were you involved with the SuperFX chip dev?

[T3000]

Found this Picasso IV review

Thanks ArcticSon for the Amiga 5.0 article and the ads. I recall listening to the same convergance sphiel at Amiwest'98.
I swear those cards went for way more new...:egad:

[zipper]

In the meeting they were {bleep}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 the 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.

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

[A4000_Mad]

Found this Picasso IV review

Thanks :pint:

One of the cool features noone mentioned was the PIP (Picture in Picture) for realtime video decoding and resizing of the window of the video player. It is used by Moovid and Riva

I've recently bought MoovidPPC version and it now looks like the CV64/3D will be being replaced by a Picasso IV :-)

[zipper]

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.

Only MastaTabs aka Tobias Seiler knows for sure.

I think they were testing an adapted Mac Voodoo card as the source but because of form factors the PCB should be totally redesigned. It was once cancelled, then after PIV users collected some 150-250 names as sort of preorderers they continued the project until it got finally cancelled.

[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)

[Amithony]

A4000_Mad wrote:

zipper wrote:
Both - like I have, and Voodoo3, too  :-D

If there's one thing I hate, it's GREED :lol:

Wouldnt the SAM do things better yet?

[ArcticSon]

You are welcome!  Glad to provide the tiny "time capsule"!

  -Steve