Amiga Mag HDD Backup/Amiga Mag HDD Backup.zip/Amiga Mag HDD Backup/Alexander.img.bin/Alexander.img/***3 Number 4/3 General material/INFO ON M2!!!! (Interview with…

Text File | 1995-02-03 | 9KB | 175 lines

Subject: INFO ON M2!!!! (Interview with RJ Mical)
From: [e-mail]
Date: 30 Jan 1995 17:12:59 -0600
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>

This might shed some light on the clueless posts that have been covering the
rgv3DO newsgroup lately....  Don't say I didn't tell ya!  I'll put the most
important info in the NEW 3DO USERS FAQ, so you don't forget...  ;)

The M2 info is towards the end of the article.

--------------------------------

RJ MICAL:  ARCHITECT OF THE FUTURE

According to legend 3DO was originally designed on a napkin...

"Yes, the 3DO was first sketched out on a napkin while we [RJ, Needle and
David Morse] were having lunch in a restaurant in September 1989. The final
system is more or less exactly what we sketched out. . . . We've been
inventing things together for many years now and the way we work together
is quite special . Dave does hardware, I do software, but when we first set
out to design a thing we make no reaI distinction between hardware and soft
ware; instead we treat it as an amorphous concept that will get teased
apart into hardware and software components over time. Once we understand
(more or less) the nature of what we're creating, then we go off to work on
our respective parts. And that' s when the real magic begins, because that's
when the real brains get involved, engineers who take our basic ideas and
flesh them out into systems that always do more than we originally
imagined."

When did you decide to adopt the Operating System approach and what are its
advantages?

"Before we linked up with Trip and his grand plan to create a standard, we
had no intention of requiring developers to use the Operating System. But
the standard meant we needed to allow the hardware system to evolve and
expand over time" and also that all software would always run on all
versions of the hardware. So it was essentiaI to create an impenetrabIe
layer of system software between the appIication and the hardware.
'Trip was actually strongly opposed to my plan for OS in the very
beginning because of EA' s experiences with the Amiga's OS. But i convinced
Trip that an OS was essentiaI . He wanted the standard and this
was the onIy way that I could conceive of thaf would allow us to create it.
But even when he became convinced, he still gave me the evil eye as a
threat that if my OS was horri- ble and buggy and peopIe hated it, that it
wouId mean my doom . Quote me on that! [Laughs] Delightfully the OS is
bugfree. I' m sure if you talk to developers they generally have very
favourable comments."

What' s it like working with Trip Hawkins?

"Trip is one of the most briIIiant persons i've ever known. He regularly
astonishes me with his intelligence and cIeverness... If's deIightful to
work with him. It's also hard" because Trip is very demanding, very
particular" critical" and frank. Trip expects the very best. That' s one
of the key reasons why 3DO has been so successful."

What is the most impressive thing you've seen on 3DO so far?

"Well, that's a hard one - there's a lot of them. Probably the single
most coolest thing would be the visual and audio realism of FIFA
International Soccer. This game looks and feels so real that the players
feel they're really in the game!"

All your previous designs have centred on sprite graphics. Do you think
3D has become overrated?

"I think 3D realism is extremely important. That' s why we designed the
3DO system to have the horsepower required to create 3D games such as
Off-World or Road Rash. Furthermore, the M2 Accelerator will add the next
generation of 3D graphics capabilities and audio that' s the next step
beyond today's 3DO system."

M2 is said to offer at least five times the performance of Sony's
PlayStation. How will you achieve this?

"When we set out to design the M2 Accelerator " we decided to build a
development team with a broad range of experience" some from the games
industry some with high-end graphics engine hardware and software
experience, some of the best 3DO people and some very special new people
hired in . Then we took our time and evolved the technology in a way
that satisfied everyone' s design criteria. The result: M2 is a blindingly
fast 3D engine with a multitasking OS, it will do incredible games, will
continue the 3DO standard, and is expandabIe. . . l've been invoIved
recentIy in severaI demonstrations of M2' s performance, including demos
I've written myseIf, and the results are very exciting!"

Will it be 64bit?

"It' s a real 64bit system" throughout the whole of the
system. A lot of the other systems that talk about being 64bit don't
quite live up to it, because there are certain lower bit data widths which
will ultimately be their reaI bottlenecks and limit their performance. One
of the other things that we've done is our whole system architecture" the
way the memory and the DMA devices and everything else is laid out is
designed for maximum performance. A lot of the other people that put
these systems together lack this overall system architecture approach,
which gives us inherent performance advantages."

Will the M2 basically drive the 3DO system?

"lt' s more accurate to say they co-exist because we' re going to be able
to use a lot of the resources of the 3DO; the CD Drive, power supply -
things like that. We're going to be abIe leverage off the existing system
as much as possible to keep the price down."

What about memory?  The chips keep getting more powerful, but RAM is
limited.

"Right, and that's why we've tried to at all time to create a machine that
does as much of the work in hardware as possible.  Especially in having a
lot of different formats for data compression built into the system, so that
data itself can take up less RAM and you can therefore have that much more
rich detail both for graphics and audio.  We have a lot, a lot of
compresion algorithms to handle the graphics, but also with audio.  We
have a lot of different convenient ways for you to handle audio data, so
that you can have compression and lower resolution audio that's handled
automatically by the system, wth the audio track spiffed up to sound as
good as it can with the data it has.  Memory  is always going to be real a
big concern.  PC owners do have 8 and 16 megs systems, they pay thousands
of dollars for them.  They won't be paying thousands of dollars for our
rig."

It must be interesting developing software for it.

"It's a lot of fun creating those tools.  Once of the things we're going to
see a lot of on the M2 are applications that will use actual human forms.
People acting out animal shapes and things like that, where you will
actually record the movement that that human form is going through.  They
cal it Motion Capture.  It's the art of putting sensors on a body, so if
you were going to do a tennis game, you wuld put sensors on the body of a
tennis player and record him  The end result is animaton that is
extraordinarily realistic...

When will it be finished?

"It's coming along nicely, software is being developed already based on
early version of the system.  I don't know what the exact release dates
are, I know that we're talking about having the system and software
available by Christmas 95."

How would you compare the existing 3DO to a PC?

"Not only do programs run faster on 3DO, but they also look much better,
too, giving the user a more rich and satisfying experience.  The 3DO has so
many powerful features that it's taken time for developers to understand and
take advantage of them all.  But it's happening now.  Look at titles such
as Road Rash, Off-World Interceptor or FIFA International Soccer  These are
superb 3D games with lots of depth and detail.  3DO games will always
look more natural and realistic than PC games because the 3DO  was
designed to work with a television, not a computer monitor.  People turn
to computers when they want crisp numbers, and they turn to their TV's when
they want real-life entertainment."

What would you like to say to sum up 3DO?

"The thing I'd emphasise most about 3DO is the quality of the employees.
The overall company spirit, the excitement and passion and drive that we
still have around here.  The company is already 400 strong but it still has
the quality of a start-up  in the commitment people bring here.  It's an
exhilarating place to work, I love working here!"


<3DO MAGAZINE, UK>  Scanned (then typed... Stupid OCR!) by Simon.


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