Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 14:00:00 -0600 From: Jeff Grant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I've been tinkering with a batch of Supermac Thunderstorms with At&t 16A dsps on them in photoshop 3.0. (IIci and quadra 950) This may be a stupid question, but are there any known resources about these chips, if I were to try and write a plugin to accelerate jpeg draws in web browsers instead of just photoshop. The easy answer of course would be to find cpu accelerators . . . I've searched the net for ideas with no luck. I guess these chips are pretty old. '92 I think. Thanks,
There should be a more complete part number than 16A on the DSP chips. With the part number you may be able to find a datasheet for the DSP chip. However, that still won't tell you how the chip is accessed through the NuBus interface. For that, you'd need to track down some old SuperMac or Radius (Radius bought SuperMac) engineers most likely, or do some pretty good sleuthing.
Postings to the comp.sys.mac.programming.* hierarchy of news groups might turn up some knowledgable folks. Searching dejanews in the same groups might also be helpful.
Also, if you download the Hardware Developer Notes for the Q660AV and Q840AV from Apple there are extensive sections on the programming interface for the DSP in those machines. That may or may not give you some lateral insight into the video card DSPs.
Having the datasheet for the chips might tell you something about what choices the original designers had for hooking the chips up to the host's bus though.
If you can't find the datasheet elsewhere on the web, it is probably available here: <http://www.freetradezone.com> but they'll charge you $10 to download it.
The Radius Thunder IV GX series had a similar arrangement with a daughter board called the Photoengine. It bears four AT&T DSPs and may be a descendant of the SuperMac hardware.
Please report back if you find anything interesting. This is an interesting line of inquiry. It would be very cool if you could accelerate web browsing on these old machines using a DSP bearing video card.
Jeff Walther
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