Remember the NUON that never was?

[Grall]

I remember reading about this thing years and years ago, it had very respectable FP performance for its time I believe, but what was its specs, really? I've forgotten!

And what about the basic architecture, anyone know anything about it? Strong points, weak?

*G*

 

[Dolemite]

Is this the DVD player chip Nuon?

http://www.nuon-dome.com/

 

[Tahir2]

I remember hearing it wasnt built for polygon throughput but particle effects.

Also heard that Richard Miller of ATARI Jaguar fame (maybe fame is the wrong word here) and even Jeff Minter of Tempest 2000 fame (and llama's and sheep called Flossy) had some say in its design.

It was meant to reaplce the DVD encoding chip as it was not much more complex and could carry out the functions of such a chip with added multimedia effects (like particle effects). I think Toshiba and some other manufacturers did release DVD players that were NUON enabled and there were a few games out for it too but it bombed big time.

 

[duffer]

I heard (from second and third-hand reports) that Nuon had no fp performance to speak of -- it was a Jaguar-like architecture, with everything (game logic, 3D T&L, and rasterization) done in microcode.

Think of it as a TransMeta approach to 3D - with similar lackluster results.

Graphically the some of the games looked like a cross between the PSX and the N64 in visual quality. Other games looked really rough, like bad Amiga ports.

The core idea - provide games "for free" on top of a cheap DVD player - wasn't bad. But the game console was very low powered, and hard to program, and just sort of got lost in the noise.

(I also think maybe it wasn't a cost-effective DVD player.)

 

[Tahir2]

It was a cost effective solution.

But then it had other hardware glitches too particularly regarding freezes... you can still get some NUON based DVD players for less than $200.