When Atari put the Motorola 56001 DSP in the Falcon computer, it was The
Right Thing(tm). Look at the sw that emerged for the platform: HD
recording et al. There was also an image viewer that used the DSP to
decompress JPG images.
The reason that Atari failed was not to put a DSP in their computers,
the same goes for NeXT, that did the same earlier. And the reason that
Apple removed the DSP's from their Macs was probably that the PowerPC
was too powerful and the used DSP was too much audio-only.
A 50$ general-purpose DSP board one could plug into the PCI slot and
that brought drivers for Windows with it would be good seller, IMO. It
could be used w/ Photohop/Gimp plugins, games (geometry setup - There
exists a Doom engine for the Falcon that does the geometry setup on the
56K and the texture mapping on the 68K), audio effects, ..., ...
So, DSP's in PC's is still a good idea, IMO. And it will become a better
idea still in the future...
Marc
-- Marc Mutz <Marc@Mutz.com> http://marc.mutz.com/ University of Bielefeld, Dep. of Mathematics / Dep. of PhysicsPGP-keyID's: 0xd46ce9ab (RSA), 0x7ae55b9e (DSS/DH)
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