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Alpha microprocessor to star in networked arcade games
The second 64-bit processor to find a prospective home in entertainment, the Digital Equipment Alpha AXP microprocessor will provide computing muscle to a slick arcade-game host. Unlike the Mips-Nintendo plan announced last fall (see Electronic Products, October 1993, p. 19), this one doesn't forecast home use later.
According to an agreement between Visions of Reality Corp. (Irvine CA) and Kubota Pacific Computer, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA), a series of “Family Entertainment Centers” will be placed this year in malls and arcades all over the U.S., as well as in Paris and London. The centers will have networked clusters of pods, from 6 to 36 in a center (see photo).
Each pod will have a virtual-reality helmet driven by a Kubota-Pacific 3300 3D workstation with an Alpha AXP CPU and hardware graphics accelerator. These can run the display at 30 frames/s for realistic motion. Game producers will be able to take advantage of the workstation's built-in Ethernet links to write multiplayer games. Presumably linked games would allow dogfights between spaceships, or whatever, with the spaceship of each player appearing in the worlds of all the others. For antiquarians, P51 Mustangs could duel with Zeroes or ME109s. Spads, Sopwith Camels, and Fokker triplanes will have to wait for wind machines to be added.
The workstation used in the pod offers 84 SPECint92 and 100 SPECfp92 performance. It is expandable, with room for up to 20 frame-buffer modules and six transform-engine modules, all of which make graphics performance expand to fit the money available. Thus a deluxe pod could have higher resolution or other features that would command a premium in the arcade.
If applications like this are successful, the hardware in them could become cheaper through volume. Both Mips and Digital stand to benefit, but they also meet almost head on in yet another market. The Mips-Nintendo machine will be less dependent on existing workstation designs and may be cheaper to begin with. On the other hand, the readily expandable Kubota, if it doesn't price itself out of the market immediately, will allow experiments to determine what game players will actually pay for.
–Rodney Myrvaagnes
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