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 Post subject: Cube Quest: Some Info on the Hardware
PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 9:45 pm 
Grizzled Veteran
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Joined: Wed May 09, 2001 1:00 am
Posts: 103
Location: San Diego, CA USA
I thought that the Daphne Devs might be interested in this. On this page, there is some info on the hardware of Cube Quest. This developer even got some of it emulated, too. I read earlier on this forum that the devs were interested in the ROM dump of it, so I thought you might be interested the hardware it runs on:

http://philwip.mameworld.info/ has all the info

Cube Quest is the second arcade game to feature solid-filled polygons (I believe it was released shortly after Atari's I-Robot). As you'd expect, the hardware is rather complex. An 8MHz 68000 commands three AMD AM2901 bit-slice ALU based processors. The first, a 16-bit 'Rotate' CPU, peforms 3D maths (including serial multiplication and division) much like the mathbox found in I-Robot, Battle Zone, Tempest etc. A 12-bit 'Line' CPU interprets the data sets produced by the Rotate CPU and produces series of line spans using a hardware implementation of Bresenham's line drawing algorithm, which are then processed by the line-fill circuit. Finally, there's a 16-bit CPU for 16-channel, stereo sound generation - not nearly as exciting as it sounds but it does produce some interesting sounds.


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PostPosted: Wed Aug 20, 2008 9:47 pm 
DAPHNE Creator
DAPHNE Creator

Joined: Sat Jan 20, 2001 1:00 am
Posts: 2127
Location: Salt Lake City,Utah, USA
Thanks, Stephen H. I have already been talking to Phil about his amazing work, but I do appreciate you bringing this to our attention nonetheless.


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