Propeller PropGFX

PropGFX graphics co-processor for embedded microcontroller applications playing video direct from SD card

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Microcontroller
• Video
• Graphics
• Parallax
• Propeller
• Hybrid
• Hydra

[gonepishing]

is that vid from big money?

[PropGFX]

no it's Dire Straits, Money For Nothing music vid.

[DavidStudiosproduct]

@soshimo Could I use the propeller chip as a graphics processor and accelerate it with the sdram? or do i need a actual 3d graphics processor to go with it?

[soshimo]

@DavidStudiosproduct Yes, you could go with DRAM or SDRAM and using a clever caching strategy you could get a decent amount of polygons rendered with an acceptable framerate.

[DavidStudiosproduct]

@soshimo Could you maybe use another ram chip for it?

[soshimo]

@Primiscomputers

True, but the N64 also had dedicated hardware paths for retrieving said textures (no way you could store all textures for Rayman 2 in memory at once). So, you would have to have some sort of DRAM or other fast memory access where you can store the textures which aren't being used at the time. N64 did this by caching off the disk and using very smart loading schemes to make sure that there was never a cache hit when reading textures.

[Primiscomputers]

@soshimo the N64 only had 2k ram, so If used carefully, you could make some pretty nice textures (look at Rayman 2 the Great Escape)

[soshimo]

At 160MIPS and a little over 600ma I think the propeller has plenty of power to push pixels and make the 3D Matrix transformations (there is a built in sine table). The only issue is the limited amount of RAM - for the prop I it's about 2K which doesn't allow for a lot of texture storage.

[orangetide]

Nice, where can I get more information on it?

[gonepishing]

what I mean is cheap looking by today's standards =/

[fuzzywzhe]

CGI wasn't cheap in the 80s. When that video was made, the Commodore 64 had been out for 2 years and the Nintendo was still being developed.

[gonepishing]

had the look of that cheap-old cgi from the 80's that they used in "big money"

didnt know money for nothing had some of the classy cgi in it too