🚀 go-pugleaf

>This may be a great idea in theory, but implementation may be difficult
>Not for any hardware problems, but the "chicken and egg" software problem.
>
>You will have a very hard time selling sprite boards unless there is
>software that uses it, but you won't get the software developers to
>develop for it unless there are a LOT of theme out there.  
>One more problem is that most of the bigger software companies' games
>have to support their products on lots of different platforms, and have
>the games play basically the same on all of them.  The general 
>philosophy tends to be "the game has to play on a very basic system.  If
>we support 'cool' hardware (eg. MT32 audio, svga, etc) it will make the
>game look/sound cooler, but will not affect the basic play of the game.
>I.e. we won't do a game that REQUIRES a player to have some extra 
>hareware."  
>However, that might be a neat project for a small software house, maybe
>packeged with the hardware....just a thought.....
>
>-Brian Schmidt (free-lance sound developer for arcade/cartridge games)
>A
>
>

I'm not the one to do it, but from what I understand it would be possible
to design a sprite accelerator card to go along with an existing VGA card.
The sprite card would have it's own memory and would control video memory
directly. With a good deal of thought it could be compatible with all 
current video modes. I would guess that a card like this would cost around
$80-$100 since the technology for it would be basic. I would bet that at
that cost the card would gain enough popularity to interest software 
companies into designing games around it. There are 100s of Window's
Applications that require Windows and Windows itself costs a bit. I 
would definately buy a sprite card once it gains popularity. Imagine
if the card could only cost $40.. I bet everyone would have one within
a month or two of good advertising. If I owned Creative Labs I'd shell
out a fortune to design this kind of card. If anyone here ever has anything
to do with the design please put a nintendo controller adapter in it.