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GamePC Consortium
The GamePC Consortium was an ''ad hoc'' PC industry standards organisation in the mid-1990s. It was founded through the joint efforts of ATI Technologies, ATI's Ken Nicholson and Diamond Multimedia's Glenn Coffman. The two competing companies shared a common interest in the evolution of PC games and agreed that the PC graphics industry was limited by a lack of standards. At that time, the vast majority of games for PCs were written for MS-DOS and had no standardized way to access expanded memory, accelerated graphics or digital audio capabilities. Based on the notion of "a rising tide lifts all boats", the two companies established the GamePC Consortium as a way for PC hardware manufacturers and PC game software publishers to combine their efforts to establish game API standards that would enable PCs to compete with successful console game systems such as the Sega Genesis. The GamePC Consortium's member companies included 80 of the leading entertainment hardware and software PC ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ATI Technologies
ATI Technologies Inc. (commonly called ATI) was a Canadian semiconductor technology corporation based in Markham, Ontario, that specialized in the development of graphics processing units and chipsets. Founded in 1985 as Array Technology Inc., the company listed publicly in 1993. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) acquired ATI in 2006. As a major fabrication-less or fabless semiconductor company, ATI conducted research and development in-house and outsourced the manufacturing and assembly of its products. With the decline and eventual bankruptcy of 3dfx in 2000, ATI and its chief rival Nvidia emerged as the two dominant players in the graphics processors industry, eventually forcing other manufacturers into niche roles. The acquisition of ATI in 2006 was important to AMD's strategic development of its Fusion generation of computer processors, which integrated general processing abilities with graphics processing functions within a chip. Since 2010, AMD's graphics processor pro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ken Nicholson
Ken Nicholson is a video game developer. Career Nicholson is a video game developer and Windows graphics pioneer. He was the founder of GamePC Consortium and inventor of the technology used by Microsoft as the basis for Windows' DirectX graphics. Examples include: *Exidy games: Crossbow, Cheyenne, Combat, Clay Pigeon, Crackshot, Chiller, Spin-A-Ball, Top Secret, Vertigo, Vortex *Epyx games: California Games for Commodore 64, The Games: Summer Edition for Commodore 64 and IBM PC * Media Vision games: Quantum Gate, Quantum Gate II, Critical Path, Forever Growing Garden *Strategic Simulations Strategic Simulations, Inc. (SSI) was a video game developer and publisher with over 100 titles to its credit from its founding in 1979 to its dissolution in 1994. The company was especially noted for its numerous wargames, its official compute ... games: Secret of the Silver Blades for MS-DOS * ATI games: Mortal Kombat III for Windows 95, Super Bubsy for Windows 95 Reference ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Diamond Multimedia
Diamond Multimedia is an American company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, motherboards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players, however the company began with the production of the TrackStar, a PC add-on card which emulated Apple II computers. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Diamond Multimedia is a subsidiary of Tul Corporation. History The company was founded by Chong Moon Lee and H. H. Huh, who acted as the technical designer. Diamond Multimedia later merged with S3, Incorporated in 1999 after a long-time cooperative business arrangement, when S3 decided to expand their business from producing graphics chipsets to manufacturing retail graphics cards. The move paralleled the 1999 3dfx purchase of STB Systems, which changed 3dfx from a graphics chipset supplier to companies including Diamond, into a vertically-integrated graphics ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Glenn Coffman
{{disambiguation, geo ...
Glenn may refer to: Name or surname * Glenn (name) * John Glenn, U.S. astronaut Cultivars * Glenn (mango) * a 6-row barley variety Places In the United States: * Glenn, California * Glenn County, California * Glenn, Georgia, a settlement in Heard County * Glenn, Illinois * Glenn, Michigan * Glenn, Missouri * University, Orange County, North Carolina, formerly called Glenn * Glenn Highway in Alaska Organizations * Glenn Research Center, a NASA center in Cleveland, Ohio See also * New Glenn, a heavy-lift orbital launch vehicle * * *Glen, a valley *Glen (other) A glen is a valley, typically one that is long, deep, and often glacially U-shaped, usually in Scotland. Glen may also refer to: People * Glen (given name) * Glen (surname) Places * River Glen (other); covering "Glen (river)", "River G ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
S3 Graphics
S3 Graphics, Ltd (commonly referred to as S3) was an American computer graphics company. The company sold the Trio, ViRGE, Savage 3D, and Chrome series of graphics processors. Struggling against competition from 3dfx Interactive, ATI and Nvidia, it merged with hardware manufacturer Diamond Multimedia in 1999. The resulting company renamed itself to SONICblue Incorporated, and, two years later, the graphics portion was spun off into a new joint effort with VIA Technologies. The new company focused on the mobile graphics market. VIA Technologies' stake in S3 Graphics was purchased by HTC in 2011. History S3 was founded and incorporated in January 1989 by Dado Banatao and Ronald Yara. It was named S3 as it was Banatao's third startup company. The company's first products were among the earliest graphical user interface (GUI) accelerators. These chips were popular with video card manufacturers, and their followup designs, including the Trio64, made strong inroads with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alex St
Alex is a given name. It can refer to a shortened version of Alexander, Alexandra, Alexis. People Multiple *Alex Brown (other), multiple people *Alex Gordon (other), multiple people *Alex Harris (other), multiple people * Alex Jones (other), multiple people *Alexander Johnson (other), multiple people *Alex Taylor (other), multiple people Politicians *Alex Allan (born 1951), British diplomat *Alex Attwood (born 1959), Northern Irish politician * Alex Kushnir (born 1978), Israeli politician *Alex Salmond (born 1954), Scottish politician, former First Minister of Scotland Baseball players *Alex Avila (born 1987), American baseball player *Alex Bregman (born 1994), American baseball player * Alex Gardner (baseball) (1861–1921), Canadian baseball player *Alex Katz (baseball) (born 1994), American baseball player *Alex Pompez (1890–1974), American executive in Negro league baseball and Major League Baseball scout *Alex Rodr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Display Mode
Computer display standards are a combination of aspect ratio, display size, display resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. They are associated with specific expansion cards, video connectors and monitors. History Various computer display standards or display modes have been used in the history of the personal computer. They are often a combination of aspect ratio (specified as width-to-height ratio), display resolution (specified as the width and height in pixels), color depth (measured in bits per pixel), and refresh rate (expressed in hertz). Associated with the screen resolution and refresh rate is a display adapter. Earlier display adapters were simple frame-buffers, but later display standards also specified a more extensive set of display functions and software controlled interface. Beyond display modes, the VESA industry organization has defined several standards related to power management and device identification, while ergonomics standards are set by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Display Resolution
The display resolution or display modes of a digital television, computer monitor or display device is the number of distinct pixels in each dimension that can be displayed. It can be an ambiguous term especially as the displayed resolution is controlled by different factors in cathode ray tube (CRT) displays, flat-panel displays (including liquid-crystal displays) and projection displays using fixed picture-element (pixel) arrays. It is usually quoted as ', with the units in pixels: for example, ' means the width is 1024 pixels and the height is 768 pixels. This example would normally be spoken as "ten twenty-four by seven sixty-eight" or "ten twenty-four by seven six eight". One use of the term ''display resolution'' applies to fixed-pixel-array displays such as plasma display panels (PDP), liquid-crystal displays (LCD), Digital Light Processing (DLP) projectors, OLED displays, and similar technologies, and is simply the physical number of columns and rows of pixels cre ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Framebuffer
A framebuffer (frame buffer, or sometimes framestore) is a portion of random-access memory (RAM) containing a bitmap that drives a video display. It is a memory buffer containing data representing all the pixels in a complete video frame. Modern video cards contain framebuffer circuitry in their cores. This circuitry converts an in-memory bitmap into a video signal that can be displayed on a computer monitor. In computing, a screen buffer is a part of computer memory used by a computer application for the representation of the content to be shown on the computer display. The screen buffer may also be called the video buffer, the regeneration buffer, or regen buffer for short. Screen buffers should be distinguished from video memory. To this end, the term off-screen buffer is also used. The information in the buffer typically consists of color values for every pixel to be shown on the display. Color values are commonly stored in 1-bit binary (monochrome), 4-bit palettized, 8-b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
DirectDraw
DirectDraw (ddraw.dll) is an API that used to be a part of Microsoft's DirectX API. DirectDraw is used to accelerate rendering of 2D graphics in applications. DirectDraw also allows applications to run fullscreen or embedded in a window such as most other MS Windows applications. DirectDraw uses hardware acceleration if it is available on the client's computer. DirectDraw allows direct access to video memory, hardware overlays, hardware blitters, and page flipping. Its video memory manager can manipulate video memory with ease, taking full advantage of the blitting and color decompression capabilities of different types of display adapters. DirectDraw is a 2D API. That is, it contains commands for 2D rendering and does not support 3D hardware acceleration. A programmer could use DirectDraw to draw 3D graphics, but the rendering would be slow compared to an API such as Direct3D which does support 3D hardware acceleration. DirectDraw was introduced for Windows Mobile in Win ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blitter
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and fonts in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned (hence the ''bit'' in ''bit blit''), handling transparent pixels (pixels which should not overwrite the destination), and various ways of combining the source and destination data. Blitters have largely been superseded by programmable graphics process ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Page Flipping
In computer science, multiple buffering is the use of more than one buffer to hold a block of data, so that a "reader" will see a complete (though perhaps old) version of the data, rather than a partially updated version of the data being created by a "writer". It is very commonly used for computer display images. It is also used to avoid the need to use dual-ported RAM (DPRAM) when the readers and writers are different devices. Description An easy way to explain how multiple buffering works is to take a real-world example. It is a nice sunny day and you have decided to get the paddling pool out, only you can not find your garden hose. You'll have to fill the pool with buckets. So you fill one bucket (or buffer) from the tap, turn the tap off, walk over to the pool, pour the water in, walk back to the tap to repeat the exercise. This is analogous to single buffering. The tap has to be turned off while you "process" the bucket of water. Now consider how you would do it if you ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
