OMAP 2420 Dev Board and Renesas SHMobile Board

A good update of new shots from CTIA and, finally, the PowerVR Racer movie. Thanks for the coverage from the booths!

 

Neat!

 

Those screens look so small in comparison to the circuit board...

And the 2nd one has two screens! Look, for once companies actually did copy nintendo's 'revolutionary' ideas!

 

Driving two screens is pretty useful for development/presentation purposes. DS could've been its own dev station!

 

That racing demo looks a bit crap IMO. PowerVR should get a software developer to do a demo for them.

For once? :?

 

Well, Nintendo always claims they won't unveil something because other companies would steal their ideas, but it seems to very rarely happen. Or perhaps I missed all the GameCube and Super Mario Sunshine clones?

 

If Mario Sunshine was Nintendo's only game and GameCube they're only peice of hardware you might just have a point. If Nintendo had ever actually claimed that they wouldn't show GameCube because they feared a company would copy it then you might have a point. None of that is the case though.

BTW here's a question for you. Did the Playstation pad start off with analog sticks or did Sony get the idea from somewhere else?

 

PowerVR Racer highlights MBX's scalability. According to the booth signs, it was designed able to run with ample headroom for other tasks and on a fixed-point platform with a ~50-MHz MBX-Lite and no companion VGP.

The definition and color precision from the demo will be great qualities to see on a portable.

 

Oh right I see, thanks for the info

 

Well it certainly wasn't Nintendo...

In comparison to what? A current cell phone? PDA?, DS? PSP?

 

Yep, total coincidence that in the middle of the 1st 3D gen, the same gen that Nintendo introduced analog sticks to the console mass market, that Sony introduced a similar input device. From what I hear Sony had always planned to put analog sticks on the PS, but only remembered their original plan after the N64 was launched

 

The Saturn also added an analog control pad in 1996 with the superb NiGHTS 3D Controller. Had analog triggers, too.

archie4oz:

Compared to anything from the sector. Supersampled anti-aliasing and full precision blended color are great even by home console standards.

 

impressive demo. could have been a bit more artistically polished, though. like using aniso for the road textures, or at least not using mipmapping : ) seriously, when do i get one of those in a consumer unit with something less proprietary than psp-os, or at least !wince?

 

Hopefully this year. Img Tec's latest investor update reveals that there are fourteen SoCs licensing the MBX family for the PDA/phone sector between Renesas, Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Philips, and Freescale. Recently, Texas Instruments extended their license to MBX Lite in order to target power/price-sensitive phones, and Intel's preparing by extending their license to cover more of the MBX family's IPs.

 

I do see the smiley, but seriously? No MIP mapping? Apart from making it look hideous, the performance would drop like a stone. I have a "development tool" hanging on the office wall that I'd like to apply to 3D coders who don't use MIP mapping...

What about the The Dell Axim?

 

Maybe that said "not wince".

 

Ah, my parser wasn't in "C" mode. Presumably that only leaves Linux....

Anyway, pardon my ignorance, but what's so bad about WinCE? AFAIAA it's running OGL-ES which seems OK.

 

The mip map boundaries are uncomfortably visible. I take it then that Kyro's "fast trilinear" either doesn't work with PVRTC or it takes up too much silicon real estate. I'm a little disappointed TBH. The lack of trilinear filtering on many DC games (e.g. MSR, PSO) was IMHO its most annoying deficiency. It seems MBX will be the same.

 

thanks, lazy. let's hope we see something along these lines.

ok, seriously. aside from the performance consideration, mipmapping (w/o aniso) on roads is a big no-no in my book. actually it's a big no-no on any surfaces meant to be viewed under steep angles most of the time. mips weren't designed for such conditions, and do happen to look atrocious under such for the most of the time. so if i can take the performance hit, i'd go with carefully selected textures resolutions and no mipmaps in those cases.

oh, i'm ok with ogl/se, i'm not ok with the rest of the environment. it gives me the creeps. somehow reminds me of 'mini me' from austin powers, just not funny.