Did this Card Ever Exist?

[sir doris]

Reading through an old copy of Edge the other week I came accross a news article stating that Cirrus Logic were going to licence the M2 3D0 technology for a PC video card :? . Did this card ever exist and if so did anyone get to benchmark it? I guess the Magazine must have been about 1996/ 7?

Thx.

 

[Phantom69]

Hi,

It appears that no cards were produced using this technology. I can't prove this as such, but reading the 3DO shareholders statement for 1999 [1]. Bottom of page 4, it talks of Cirrus Logic paying them $2.5million of the $7million license fee on a fee-per-completion basis, and then only paying the rest off due to litigation. This implies that Cirrus Logic didnt develop the technology to completion.
This probably had something to do with the fact that in June 1997 Cirrus Logic "sold or licensed most of their assets to Samsung Electronics" [1], this was so they could 'focus their operations on developing software'. This is likely to tie in with the MS Talisman project that Samsung+3DO yanked the plug on [2], quickly followed by Cirrus Logic.
According to another website [3] (about half way down page), the card would have apeared around Christmas 1996, at the time of the M2 launch (which never occurred).



[1] http://www.3do.com/investors/thdo_990816_200_120.pdf
[2] http://www.vxm.com/21R.114.html
[3] http://www.mds.mdh.se/~eko93pjn/morenews/aprnews.htm



HTH

P69

 

[sir doris]

Thanks,
What a shame, I was always interested in the M2 technology and I though this might have been a chance to get a glimps of what it might have been capable of, ah well...

Thanks again.