🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <kennehra.718763368@craft.camp.clarkson.edu> kennehra@craft.camp.clarkson.edu (Rich"TheMan"Kennehan) writes:
>
>Maybe IBM defined a display memory just because they're IBM!  Think
>about it, their joysticks stink, and so do their video cards!  That's
>why we're trying to build the sprite engine!  To make up for their
>mistakes!  BTW, much of this project is weighing on whether or not the
>sprite engine can read DOS memory fast enough to send to a monitor! 
>Adding about a meg of ram to the sprite engine will drive up production
>costs considerably and might affect its marketablility!  If the sprite
>engine CAN read dos memory fast enough, then this cardÿ should'nt cost
>more than 50 bucks!!!  And that would be GREAT!!!
>
>- Rich
>  kennehra@logic.camp.clarkson.edu
>
>

I believe that there may be even a greater market for this card if it did
contain it's own memory. The card should be able to act as extended memory
so it would have more use for programs that don't use sprite graphics. 
Could someone here calculate the possiblilities of this in terms of speed
and compatibility? As an example, the Soundblaster card reads and writes
memory using DMA. That is exactly what this sprite engine would do. 
Maybe someone could hack a SB card to do R/W with video memory and system
memory with DMA transfers.. That would really be something especially if
it was a simple hardware modification. It would be quite useless though 
unless you were to have very large sprites because you would have to
reprogram the card for every offset change in the sprite. Of course the
sprite engine card would calculate these offsets in it's own hardware and do
the DMA transfers hopefully faster than a 486/50 can plot a pixel.
							
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