crum@alicudi.usc.edu (Gary L. Crum) (06/30/91)
I received a NeXTdimension board the other day. The board design is beautiful -- it's quite different from the picture of the prototype used in past advertising literature, and different from the picture published in NextWorld. The circuit board is darker, more green than orange, and there is no square connection socket for a C-Cube CL-550 JPEG compression chip. Instead, there is a long connector in the interior of the board that looks like the connector on the edge of the board for NeXTbus connection. There are two chips on the board with both the Motorola symbol and the "NEXTDIMENSION" label on them. Yay, NeXT is apparently working closely with Motorola or at least using some sort of chip fabrication facility at Motorola. Maybe there's hope that NeXT will introduce an '050-based system early (as soon as the '050 is available), and/or bring interesting multiprocessor configurations and the 88110 to the market relatively soon. I'd be glad to write more about the ND later. But, I can't yet use it with my NeXTcube '030 because I lack an NBIC chip. My NBIC was backordered. Can anyone sale or rent me an NBIC chip, e.g. from an '040 board? I would guess that the NBIC chip on '040 boards is in a socket, although I'm not sure of that. If someone has an extra chip not in an '040 board, that would be great. I would also guess that if the NBIC on '040 boards is socketed, then they can be used without the NBIC installed, since most '030 boards are being used without NBICs. An '040 upgrade board is a natural thing to get, but I value new functionality most -- I am interested far more in functionality than performance, in most cases. I really appreciate NeXT making the NeXTdimension board work with the '030. At least I have a reasonable amount of memory on my '030 board -- 24MB RAM and 1.2G disk. Performance via multiprocessing involves new functionality (system calls), so a board with multiple processors would be very high on my interest list. Also, I seem to notice I/O performance differences more than most people, and the '040 boards (along with current software) don't yet utilize synchronous SCSI, and they use the same 25MHz NeXTbus specification. The '040 board did introduce serial port hardware flow control. That's good. Another reason I don't have an '040 upgrade yet is that it doesn't seem to be shipping readily. I got the NeXTdimension board less than three weeks after I placed the order for it. I think I placed the ND order at the right time, or maybe it was just my nice tone of voice when I talked to the order dept. :-) Oops, I don't mean to make people feel bad who place orders last October and only recently received their ND boards, if there are such people. Speaking of functionality, NeXTstation (non-color) owners shouldn't be too sad that their systems can't display color and can't accomodate NeXTdimension boards. NeXT 2.1 Extended is identical on color and non-color systems, so people with non-color 2.1 extended systems can for example become familiar (and compile applications) with the color-related system software like the color panel and even the NXLiveVideoView object which provides access to NeXTdimension NTSC-resolution video I/O capabilities. And once people do upgrade to color hardware, their software does not need to change -- they just start seeing color where appropriate. There is however an update to 2.1 for NeXTdimension users that changes a few things, including the NXLiveVideoView class interface, so non-NeXTdimension users may need to get that from NeXT somehow in order to understand the development interface completely. Hopefully things like color and NeXTdimension support (along with the rest of the NeXTstep development environment) will continue to to be standard and very accessible parts of NeXT system software. That is, when Release 3 comes out it should include the latest version of NeXTdimension and color documentation and libraries, even on non-color systems (if it's still a relatively small part of system software, otherwise if the installing person desires to have those components around). The program interface documentation is quite useful for understanding what one can do with a NeXTdimension. For example, one can indeed add computer graphics on top of real-time video as it is passed to the video output, but the alpha value of graphics drawing is not used to blend computer graphics into the real-time video. Video "shows through" only when pixel alpha values indicate complete transparency (alpha=0.0). That's too bad and -- it means that the NeXTdimension cannot (currently) be used for some obvious things like real-time titling of the quality that one sees on broadcast television stations (CNN does a good job with quality and sublety). Still, having full 8-bit alpha in the frame buffer will allow non-real-time titling of this quality. I guess the alpha blending with real-time video is a hard (expensive) problem, or just not yet implemented in the NeXTdimension driver software that runs on the i860. If someone can get (rent or sale, like for $50 or $100) me an NBIC chip soon then I will probably have my system in a demo the Virtual Reality Applications Gallery at SIGGRAPH (in Las Vegas at the end of July). Look for NeXTs being used in conjunction with IBM RISC System/6000 and Silicon Graphics computers, and come up and say hi! I understand that the NBIC I ordered won't be shipped for another month. Hopefully the backorder indicates that a lot of '040 upgrades were sold or that the NBIC is being changed to support changes in NeXTbus for upcoming systems. That's pure speculation, but isn't that one fun aspect of USENET? Finally, I would like to thank the world for the fact that my NeXT system still works even after a rack fell and hit it during the earthquake. Jag maste ga nu, Gary (Reply by e-mail or by voice phone (818)441-8856 about the NeXTbus Interface Chip (NBIC).)