🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <480@lakesys.UUCP>, martin@lakesys.UUCP (Martin Wiedmeyer) writes:
> In article <2176@saturn.ucsc.edu> koreth@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Steven Grimm) writes:
> >Also, has anyone heard anything about the Atari Abaq
> >(beyond what was posted in comp.sys.atari.st, which may have been crossposted
> >here and which I can dig up if someone would like to see it...)
> >
>
> Steven,
>
> 	I for one would like to see the Abaq info. Is it any more than the
> Atari company hype? (Hope so....)
>

If you write to Perihelion they should be able to send you the
Helios Developers Notes, this gives an overview and I posted
most of the info last November to comp.sys.transputer, comp.sys.atari.st
and comp.sys.amiga.

Since then a group of friends has coughed up 50 pounds to become registered
developers and we are getting manuals sent to us and offers of beta release
hardware for porting applications.

So far we have the Helios Developer's Manual which gives an overview
of the system structure, details of the C compiler, assembler and libraries.
Also the Helios Technical Manual which describes the message passing system,
kernel, nucleus, servers, file formats etc.

We are waiting for the Helios User's manual (shell and X-windows) and the
hardware manual.

The machine was previewed in Personal Computer World for Feb 88.
As a quick overview the basic machine has a single T800-20 with 4Mb of main
RAM and 1Mb of video RAM; an interface to an Atari Mega ST containing
a 68450 DMA controller, Inmos Link adaptor and SCSI controller; three
expansion slots that can take extra memory (4Mb or 16Mb per card) or extra
T800's (4 of with 1Mb each per card).
Other I/O ports are driven via the Mega ST.

There are two configurations, one is an extension box for a standard Mega ST;
the other is an all in one system that has a cut down ST circuit built into
the Abaq.

The graphics is always driven by the T800 so the Mega  ST graphics is
not needed.  ST applications running on the 68000 that  use GEM traps
are translated to appear on the Abaq screen (this wastes the T800 but
gives access to existing software).

Display modes are       1280 * 960 * 4bpp (4096 colours)
                        1024 * 768 * 8bpp (16M colours)
                         640 * 480 * 8bpp (16M colours)
                         512 * 480 * 32bpp (true colour+overlays+tags)

There is a custom chip called "Charity" which includes a blitter
that can do comparisons as well as bit operations and has operations
that know about colours. It has a 64 bit wide interface to the video
RAM and can do four comparisons on 8 byte sized pixels in one memory
cycle and write different bytes back out based on the results of the
comparison. It can plot pixel aligned characters at 64 million
pixels/sec and does 2D barrel shifting.

This is the hottest blitter that I have ever heard of.

Helios is also available to run with an IBM PC/B004 type of system.
Structurally it is like AmigaDos in that it is multitasking with
file handler tasks etc but it looks good and is written from scratch
in C to be as unix like as possible.

The Abaq is being launched at the Hannover Fair later this month
so more details should be out soon. The basic price will be about
3000 pounds (without monitor) for performance below that of
a SUN 4/110C (at 20K pounds+) for processing speed but faster for
graphics.

Atari (UK) is on (0753) 33344
Perihelion Software is on (0749) 4203
-- 
  |   Adrian Cockcroft anc@camcon.uucp  ..!seismo!mcvax!ukc!camcon!anc
-[T]- Cambridge Consultants Ltd, Science Park, Cambridge CB4 4DW,
  |   England, UK                                        (0223) 358855
      (You are in a maze of twisty little C004's, all alike...)