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Atari Falcon
The Atari Falcon030 (usually shortened to Atari Falcon), released in 1992, was the final personal computer product from Atari Corporation. A high-end model of the Atari ST line, the machine is based on a Motorola 68030 CPU and a Motorola 56001 digital signal processor, a feature which distinguishes it from most other microcomputers of the era. It includes a new VIDEL programmable graphics system which greatly improves graphics capabilities. Shortly after release, Atari bundled the MultiTOS operating system in addition to TOS. TOS remained in ROM, and MultiTOS was supplied on floppy disk and could be installed to boot from hard disk. The Falcon was discontinued in late 1993–a year after its introduction–as Atari restructured itself to focus completely on the release and support of the Atari Jaguar video game console. The Falcon sold in relatively small numbers, mainly to hobbyists. Hardware The heart of the system is the 32-bit Motorola 68030 clocked at 16 MHz. It ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atari Corporation
Atari Corporation was an American manufacturer of computers and video game consoles. It was founded by Jack Tramiel on May 17, 1984, as Tramel Technology, Ltd., but then took on the Atari name less than two months later when Warner Communications sold the home computing and game console assets of Atari, Inc. to Tramiel. Its chief products were the Atari ST, Atari XE, Atari 7800, Atari Lynx and Atari Jaguar. The company reverse merged with JTS Inc. in 1996, becoming a small division which itself closed after JTS sold all Atari assets to Hasbro Interactive in 1998. History The company was founded by Commodore International's founder Jack Tramiel soon after his resignation from Commodore in January 1984. Initially named Tramel Technology, Ltd., the company's goal was to design and sell a next-generation home computer. On July 1, 1984, TTL bought the Consumer Division assets of Atari, Inc. from Warner, and TTL was renamed Atari Corporation. Warner sold the division for $240 m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
32-bit
In computer architecture, 32-bit computing refers to computer systems with a processor, memory, and other major system components that operate on data in 32- bit units. Compared to smaller bit widths, 32-bit computers can perform large calculations more efficiently and process more data per clock cycle. Typical 32-bit personal computers also have a 32-bit address bus, permitting up to 4 GB of RAM to be accessed; far more than previous generations of system architecture allowed. 32-bit designs have been used since the earliest days of electronic computing, in experimental systems and then in large mainframe and minicomputer systems. The first hybrid 16/32-bit microprocessor, the Motorola 68000, was introduced in the late 1970s and used in systems such as the original Apple Macintosh. Fully 32-bit microprocessors such as the Motorola 68020 and Intel 80386 were launched in the early to mid 1980s and became dominant by the early 1990s. This generation of personal computers coin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
CD-ROM
A CD-ROM (, compact disc read-only memory) is a type of read-only memory consisting of a pre-pressed optical compact disc that contains data. Computers can read—but not write or erase—CD-ROMs. Some CDs, called enhanced CDs, hold both computer data and audio with the latter capable of being played on a CD player, while data (such as software or digital video) is only usable on a computer (such as ISO 9660 format PC CD-ROMs). During the 1990s and early 2000s, CD-ROMs were popularly used to distribute software and data for computers and fifth generation video game consoles. DVD started to replace it in these roles starting in the early 2000s. History The earliest theoretical work on optical disc storage was done by independent researchers in the United States including David Paul Gregg (1958) and James Russel (1965–1975). In particular, Gregg's patents were used as the basis of the LaserDisc specification that was co-developed between MCA and Philips after MCA purch ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
SCSI
Small Computer System Interface (SCSI, ) is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices. The SCSI standards define commands, protocols, electrical, optical and logical interfaces. The SCSI standard defines command sets for specific peripheral device types; the presence of "unknown" as one of these types means that in theory it can be used as an interface to almost any device, but the standard is highly pragmatic and addressed toward commercial requirements. The initial Parallel SCSI was most commonly used for hard disk drives and tape drives, but it can connect a wide range of other devices, including scanners and CD drives, although not all controllers can handle all devices. The ancestral SCSI standard, X3.131-1986, generally referred to as SCSI-1, was published by the X3T9 technical committee of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 1986. SCSI-2 was published in August 1990 as X3.T9.2/86-109 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Integrated Drive Electronics
Parallel ATA (PATA), originally , also known as IDE, is a standard interface designed for IBM PC-compatible computers. It was first developed by Western Digital and Compaq in 1986 for compatible hard drives and CD or DVD drives. The connection is used for storage devices such as hard disk drives, floppy disk drives, and optical disc drives in computers. The standard is maintained by the X3/ INCITS committee. It uses the underlying (ATA) and Packet Interface (ATAPI) standards. The Parallel ATA standard is the result of a long history of incremental technical development, which began with the original AT Attachment interface, developed for use in early PC AT equipment. The ATA interface itself evolved in several stages from Western Digital's original Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) interface. As a result, many near-synonyms for ATA/ATAPI and its previous incarnations are still in common informal use, in particular Extended IDE (EIDE) and Ultra ATA (UATA). After the i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Atari
Atari () is a brand name that has been owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by French publisher Atari SA through a subsidiary named Atari Interactive. The original Atari, Inc., founded in Sunnyvale, California, in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney, was a pioneer in arcade games, home video game consoles and home computers. The company's products, such as '' Pong'' and the Atari 2600, helped define the electronic entertainment industry from the 1970s to the mid-1980s. In 1984, as a result of the video game crash of 1983, the home console and computer divisions of the original Atari Inc. were sold off, and the company was renamed Atari Games Inc. Atari Games received the rights to use the logo and brand name with appended text "Games" on arcade games, as well as the derivative coin-operated arcade rights to the original 1972–1984 arcade hardware properties. The Atari Consumer Electronics Division properties were in turn sold ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Planar (computer Graphics)
In computer graphics, planar is the method of arranging pixel data into several '' bitplanes'' of RAM. Each bit in a bitplane is related to one pixel on the screen. Unlike packed, high color, or true color graphics, the whole dataset for an individual pixel isn't in one specific location in RAM, but spread across the bitplanes that make up the display. Planar arrangement determines how pixel data is laid out in memory, not how the data for a pixel is interpreted; pixel data in a planar arrangement could encode either indexed or direct color. This scheme originated in the early days of computer graphics. The memory chips of this era can not supply data fast enough on their own to generate a picture on a TV screen or monitor from a large framebuffer. By splitting the data up into multiple planes, each plane can be stored on a separate memory chip. These chips can then be read in parallel at a slower rate, allowing graphical display on modest hardware, like game consoles of th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Random-access Memory
Random-access memory (RAM; ) is a form of computer memory that can be read and changed in any order, typically used to store working data and machine code. A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks, CD-RWs, DVD-RWs and the older magnetic tapes and drum memory), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement. RAM contains multiplexing and demultiplexing circuitry, to connect the data lines to the addressed storage for reading or writing the entry. Usually more than one bit of storage is accessed by the same address, and RAM devices often have multiple data lines and are said to be "8-bit" or "16-bit", etc. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Real-time Computing
Real-time computing (RTC) is the computer science term for hardware and software systems subject to a "real-time constraint", for example from event to system response. Real-time programs must guarantee response within specified time constraints, often referred to as "deadlines". Ben-Ari, Mordechai; "Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming", ch. 16, Prentice Hall, 1990, , page 164 Real-time responses are often understood to be in the order of milliseconds, and sometimes microseconds. A system not specified as operating in real time cannot usually ''guarantee'' a response within any timeframe, although ''typical'' or ''expected'' response times may be given. Real-time processing ''fails'' if not completed within a specified deadline relative to an event; deadlines must always be met, regardless of system load. A real-time system has been described as one which "controls an environment by receiving data, processing them, and returning the results sufficiently qui ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
JPEG
JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality. Since its introduction in 1992, JPEG has been the most widely used image compression standard in the world, and the most widely used digital image format, with several billion JPEG images produced every day as of 2015. The term "JPEG" is an acronym for the Joint Photographic Experts Group, which created the standard in 1992. JPEG was largely responsible for the proliferation of digital images and digital photos across the Internet, and later social media. JPEG compression is used in a number of image file formats. JPEG/ Exif is the most common image format used by digital cameras and other photographic image capture devices; along with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fractal
In mathematics, a fractal is a geometric shape containing detailed structure at arbitrarily small scales, usually having a fractal dimension strictly exceeding the topological dimension. Many fractals appear similar at various scales, as illustrated in successive magnifications of the Mandelbrot set. This exhibition of similar patterns at increasingly smaller scales is called self-similarity, also known as expanding symmetry or unfolding symmetry; if this replication is exactly the same at every scale, as in the Menger sponge, the shape is called affine self-similar. Fractal geometry lies within the mathematical branch of measure theory. One way that fractals are different from finite geometric figures is how they scale. Doubling the edge lengths of a filled polygon multiplies its area by four, which is two (the ratio of the new to the old side length) raised to the power of two (the conventional dimension of the filled polygon). Likewise, if the radius of a filled sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Codec
A codec is a device or computer program that encodes or decodes a data stream or signal. ''Codec'' is a portmanteau of coder/decoder. In electronic communications, an endec is a device that acts as both an encoder and a decoder on a signal or data stream, and hence is a type of codec. ''Endec'' is a portmanteau of encoder/decoder. A coder or encoder encodes a data stream or a signal for transmission or storage, possibly in encrypted form, and the decoder function reverses the encoding for playback or editing. Codecs are used in videoconferencing, streaming media, and video editing applications. History In the mid-20th century, a codec was a device that coded analog signals into digital form using pulse-code modulation (PCM). Later, the name was also applied to software for converting between digital signal formats, including companding functions. Examples An audio codec converts analog audio signals into digital signals for transmission or encodes them for storage. A r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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