Playing with TIGA #1This is my new project for next few months – SPEA Graphiti HiLite 1024 - a

Playing with TIGA #1

This is my new project for next few months – SPEA Graphiti HiLite 1024 - a TI TMS34020-based professional CAD card (“TIGA”). The video output does not work properly as some traces between the GPU and RAMDAC are bad, but the rest of the card seems to be ok. Once I fix it, I would like to play with the chip and program some benchmarks to see the real performance. It looks like TIGA cards are valuable among collectors, but there is very little info about what can be done with them. TMS340x0 chips are fully programable 32-bit integer CPUs and this (rather low-end) card has 1MB of program/data memory (in addition to 1MB of framebuffer memory). It is like a complete computer on a card.

These chips were used in the graphics subsystem of Sun 386i UNIX workstation and some CRT terminals (like DEC VT1000). There were even Amiga Zorro cards with these chips (boosted with TI floating point co-processors), but presumably the concept was too complicated at the time when most people cared just about BitBlt and basic acceleration of line drawing.

(fortunately, my Siemens Nixdorf PCD-4Lsx PC is just big enough to accommodate one full-size ISA AT card… the card is very picky and refuses to work on Pentium systems or anything with ISA clock beyond ~8MHz)