Tapwave Zodiac Now Available for Pre-order

So, anyone know when they hit the physical stores? (I'm planning on getting one, but I'd like to check it out firsthand before I plunk anything down for it.)

Also, anyone know of any reviews?

-painted dog

Ivo Jager
D3D/MT3D lead developer
www.mobilewizardry.com

The 3D API that they're providing is VERY VERY good. While it's not accelerated, it is certainly quick and does a great job with what it has.

The ATI chip does help quite a bit when it comes to fill. The 3D rendering process consists of two phases (I'm simplifying:) ), transformation and rendering.

Transforms are all of the arithmetic referred to earlier that take a object in 3D space and translate it into a 2D representation. This is completely unhelped by the Zodiac architecture.

Rendering is the actual drawing of that data. Older 3D accelerators on the PC hooked into the rendering process, allowing you to pass a set of transformed triangles to them for drawing. This helped quite a bit as it streamlined the actual rendering process in hardware (freeing up the processor for other tasks).

A 2D accelerator can help, albeit later in the process. Instead of handing triangles to the accelerator, now the programmer has to do the rendering setup himself.. but the actual drawing of the lines and shading is accelerated by the accelerator. This is still a good gain, as the ability to fill is greatly increased.

So the included hardware does provide some advantange and you'll see the best games on the Palm OS platform on the Zodiac.

Secondly the Imageon has 8mb of DEDICATED memory for it.

Third, The Imageon 3200 supported gouraud shading, now im not a 3d person, but isnt gouraud shading used for 3d games, err psx ones?

tapwave have done what everyone has been wanting over the years - to develop a device specific for gaming purposes; and, this is what they have done. by all means, no-one should say that their approach has been wrong or failed; this unit is going to make some serious head waves in the market. it already is :)

we (MobileWizardry) have been working with tapwave - unfortunately not developing games at this point :) and, we've seen the hardware, know the specifications in detail, and, what the device can and cannot do. we are soon developing some tapwave specific applications; however, we wont be using the 3rd party rendering engines (as, we already have our own).

they went out, licensed a 3D rendering engine - now, while it doesn't render 3D in hardware, the 3D rendering is good - and, will work for most games. it is a polygon based rendering engine, so the games you'll see are more PS1 style - this will be enough for most users to keep them happy.

the device itself has chosen hardware which will work best with games, this includes the choice of CPU MX1 (fastest memory-memory copy), ATI graphics chip (screen blitting) and the key controllers.

now, the x-forge engine renders pixel by pixel to an offscreen window; and, without a 3D accellerator - this takes CPU cycles = processing power. now, the benefit of the ATI graphics chip? when the rendering is done, the offscreen window is copied to the real display. the difference here? since the ATI chip exists, there is no CPU cycles used in the copying process. at 480x320, thats 153600 pixels it needs to copy, or 38400 d-words. moving that amount of memory can take time.

right now, the only difference between x-forge and an engine like deity 3d (our 3d engine) is that they render different environments (polygon vs raycasting). speed wise? deity 3d is customized, and is faster. deity 3d is limited at the same time however.

the good thing about x-forge is that developers can write to that API. when tapwave releases a unit with a 3D accelleration chip - the developers dont change anything, and, the x-forge library is tweaked to use the 3D accellerator for ultra-performance.

when the 3D accellerator exists, x-forge will walk all over deity 3D :) until then, its just a software renderer = no different from anything that everyone else does custom for existing Palm OS devices.

// az
aaron@ardiri.com
http://www.ardiri.com/
http://www.mobilewizardry.com/

hehe, this whole 3D area for PDAs reminds me of the first 3D accelerators for the PC... can't wait to be able to code 3D games using pure OpenGL and PS/VS 3.0 or whatever they'll come up with next. ;)

just imagine, in a few years u'll be able to play Doom 3 on a PDA. :D progress is so sweet.

thanks,
shurcooL

-painted dog