🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2dtrc6...@no-names.nerdc.ufl.edu> , rep...@oak.circa.ufl.edu
writes:
> With MKII's rapid success, you can bet it'll be on home systems pretty
> soon.  Here are the facts:
> 
> MKII is a 64-bit machine.  Therefore Atari's Jaguar and Nintendo's Project
> Reality will be able to do pixel-perfect renditions.

Could you please site sources for your "facts?" The Williams T-unit CPU board
found in Mortal Kombat II is not 64-bit in _any_ aspect. Let's try
illuminating the details:

The main CPU is a Texas Instruments TMS34010-50, bring run at 48MHz. Some
facts from the TMS34010 User's Guide:
	The register file is all 32-bits wide.
	The external bus is 16-bits wide, although it is triply-multiplexed. (Wacky.)
	Addressing is 32-bits wide, but 4-bits describe the bit field to extract, and
two bits are not used externally, so it's 26-bits wide, although each external
address represents a 16-bit word, so it can address 128 megabytes of external
addressing.

In addition to the 34010, the T-unit CPU board contains a custom DMA
controller (image bus 32-bits wide) and a FPGA (field-programmable gate array)
that appears to handle the memory map. Graphics are 256 colors (8-bit) only.

MKII contains 1 megabyte of code ROM and 12 megabytes of image data.

> The superb sound you hear in MKII is brought to you courtesy of DCS - 
> digitally compressed sound.  Whether a non CD based system could duplicate
> this sound is currently unknown.  I am really looking to Atari for this
> one.  It's a shot in the dark, but the system does have the capability
> to do it.  Nintendo could do it but won't.

The DCS sound board contains an Analog Devices ADSP2105KP-40. The Atari Jaguar
does contains a custom DSP (in the Jerry chip), although I don't know enough
of it's features to compare it to the ADSP-2105, although I suspect that it
could decompress digital data as quickly enough. Given the name of the system
(DCS), I would assume that the main focus of this system is to save on ROM,
although the DCS board in MKII contains 3 megabytes of ROM.

For comparison's sake, MKI had only 6 megabytes of image data ROM, 768K of
sound ROM, and 64 colors (6-bit, although I suspect that this was only a per
object restriction).

I believe that any home system could have a rendition of MKII on it, although
some would be "better" than others from a technical stand-point.

I don't think that technical details really have anything to do with the
quality of enjoyment in a video game, and I really wish that the marketing
guys would just drop the whole "number of bits, number of MIPS"-type hype, as
it doesn't mean a thing, and only serves to confuse consumers.
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