Tapwave's 'Helix' Specs Revealed
Tapwave Inc., a Silicon Valley startup located in Mountain View, CA,
founded in Spring of 2001 by Peng Lim, Byron Connell and a large
group of ex-Palm employees, announced a new handheld gaming console
on Monday night at the Palm Developer Conference with The company
hopes it will take over where Nintendo's Game Boy Advance leaves off.
Helix is aimed at "technology enthusiasts" between the age of 18 to
34. The high disposable-income bracket that enables them to purchase
this device for themselves rather than having it purchased for them
by their parents as gift. It's placed between the Nintendo Gameboy
Advance and the Nokia N-Gage in terms of features and price, offering
more hardware features than the GBA, along with full Palm OS PDA
functionality, but lacking the direct cell phone capability of the N-
Gage. While no specific game titles have been announced tentative
partnership development agreements have been mentioned with
Activision, Digital Eclipse, Infogrames/Atari and Midway Home.
No pictures are currently available of the system, because the
Tapwave wouldn't allow it, and all that is currently available to
show is a non-descript prototype in a plastic box that looks nothing
like the final unit. Even sketches are hard to come by, because the
case design hasn't been finalized. "Sneak peeks" you see on the
Internet or in games magazines over the coming months will be pure
conjecture until Tapwave make an official announcement.
The specs include the following:
- 480x320 "double density" display
- Reflective TFT LCD
- 3.8" diagonally measured LCD
- Backlit display with brightness control
- Landscape & Portrait screen modes
- Touch-sensitive digitizer screen
- Analogue joystick with depress fire button action
- 1 application programmable function button
- 1 pause/home button
- 200Mhz ARM 920T CPU (ARM9TDMI core)
- ATI Imageon 100 graphic accelerator
- 8 Mbytes of VRAM
- Yamaha sound
- Headphone jack
- Dual USB 1.1 Connectors (custom form factor)
- Infrared transceiver
- Dual SD Multimedia Card
- SDIO support to enable FM Radio, 802.11, digital cameras or GPS
- Bluetooth facilitating wireless multi-player gaming
- Left & Right trigger buttons
- Vibration "rumbler" feedback
- 4 application programmable action buttons
- Stereo speakers
- High score conduit
- MP3 playback in hardware
- 16-channel polyphonic Wavetable MIDI synthesiser
- MPEG-4 video playback in hardware
- JPEG decoder in hardware
- Slim form-factor
- 6 ounce weight (without batteries)
- Dual lithium rechargeable batteries
- 16MB Dynamic RAM
- Graffiti 2
- Palm OS 5.2
- Upgradeable to Palm OS 6.0 when available
- Current Helix games & applications are forward compatible with Palm
OS 6.0
- Input event queue updated to allow multiple, simultaneous button
events
- Motown Café Bluetooth API binary compatible with Palm Bluetooth
applications
- PINS and status bar support
- Full Palm OS PDA functionality
Tapwave said that the Helix would be priced "similarly as other games
consoles". Whether this means consoles when they are first released
($300-$400), or similar to consoles as they're priced today (around
$149) is open to conjecture. Tapwave executives refused to make
statements about its price until they are closer to their end-of-year
release date.
Nor has the company revealed its revenue model. Obviously the unit
will support traditional up-sell of commercial and shareware titles,
along with possible software rental, but whatever the final decision
is, it will alter the way the unit is sold and for how much. From
talks with Byron Connel, Senior VP of Marketing, it appears that this
may be the first Palm OS handheld to adopt the razor blade business
model that other successful console manufacturers have followed.
Tapwave hopes to turn its website into a distribution hub by
requiring registration by all Helix owners that wish to use Helix
software.
Tapwave is currently establishing a developer program that will
encourage developers to support the Helix by supplying a distribution
channel, idea generation assistance, and product development aid.
Currently there is a preliminary SDK available upon completion of a
signed license agreement. Tapwave appears intent on supporting
independent developers, and developers who want to publish their
titles using Tapwave's distribution system.
The display measures 3.8" diagonally, double-density 480x320 pixels
in 16-bit color depth with a bright white, cold LED mounted on the
side. It also has a back diffuser to give even illumination across
the entire surface area. It's about the same dimensions and pixel
density as the Sony CLIE NX70V.
Located on the top of the unit are dual SDIO compatible SD card slots
in which you can plug a Flash RAM expansion card, or software
distributed on ROM SD cards. Bluetooth support is built in.
The form factor will probably be slightly larger than the Game Boy
Advance to accommodate Helix's larger screen. You can rotate the
handheld too -- it's meant to be used in either a portrait or
landscape mode, and the buttons are designed to support either
configuration.
The final positioning and layout of the four application-programmable
buttons has yet to be determined. But after lengthy talks with the
Helix development team, it is likely it could well use the
classic "cross" configuration found on joypads for the SNES and PSX,
as Tapwave seems intent on having a D-Pad input control.
Creating applications for the Helix will be the same as for any Palm
OS 5 application. You'll use a specially version of the Palm OS 5
simulator from Tapwave that will support both a portrait and
landscape mode, coupled with Microsoft Visual C++ to create a Win32
DLL that simulates what will happen on the hardware. The analog
joystick and extra input buttons are emulated in the simulator via a
standard USB joypad. The other way to create applications will be
with Metrowerks CodeWarrior 9.0, updated with a patch available from
Tapwave and debugging done on the actual hardware. Current prototype
debug units feature a serial port to allow debugging Palm OS 5 until
CodeWarrior 9.2 is released that will support USB debugging. The
intention of Tapwave is to offer 100% compatibility with existing
Palm applications.
The CPU is based around the Motorola i.MX architecture, from the
press release it appears to be an MC9328MXL that uses the ARM9TDMI
core -- meaning no hardware floating point. Essentially it's a
standard 32-bit RISC chip with aa 5-stage integer pipeline and MMU
that powers the operating system and applications. It's supported by
an integrated LCD driver, Bluetooth communications, high-speed
multimedia cards (MMC), secure digital (SD), and USB peripheral
connectivity. The audio hardware is a Yamaha sound chip (the model
was not specified) with a an audio amplifier. The Yamaha model chosen
is capable of 16-channel polyphonic MIDI audio using Wavetable
synthesis, including high-quality MP3 and PCM decoding on-chip.
Graphic acceleration is provided by ATI, though don't expect a Radeon
9700 Pro. The capable, yet diminutive ATI Imageon 100 developed
specifically for mobile applications provides 2D rendering in a power-
efficient co-processor package that sits in-line with the 16-bit
color LCD controller. The Imageon, with a 96-bit wide internal bus,
provides two hardware cursors, panel rotation in ninety degree
intervals, native MPEG-4 and JPEG decoding using an integer discrete
cosine transform engine (iDCT) with the usual MEG standard motion
compensation, scaling, color space conversion and a minimum of 30 FPS
full-motion video. This means that the chore of decoding video won't
fall onto the battery-hungry CPU, leaving it free to run other tasks.
The Imageon is coupled to an external memory controller controlling
8MB of SDRAM video memory (four times the video memory of the
original PlayStation console) for use as texture memory and in double
& triple buffering. The Imageon provides the usual features, like 2D
acceleration including line drawing, hardware sprites, triangle fill
and bit-blit operations, alpha blending, 2D image object scaling and
rotation, along with font caching and font anti-aliasing all
performed in hardware.
Tapwave adopted a lightweight approach to the API, suiting the needs
of the Helix hardware. The emphasis is on high-performance and
lightweight rather than the catch-all emphasis of the standard Palm
OS. The Palm OS API is still accessible but games will probably
rarely use it, other than for Palm-specific user interface elements.
Library support is comprehensive, though currently due to the pre-
release nature it is still under development with some holes in
various areas, which Tapwave intends to fix by launch day. The
library is logically broken down in to graphics, sound,
communication, input, gaming and support.
Graphics are supported by a lightweight, high performance 2D API that
is a very thin layer interfacing to the hardware. It offers a common
set of 2D rendering options. Sound is similarly set up. The graphics
and audio can also be accessed via the usual Palm OS API calls. In
the Gaming and Support library can be found facilities for storing
high scores on a user's computer via Hotsync, and also on a central
server with opt-in support. An MP3 decoder, JPEG decoder, and
playlist support is found in these libraries too, along with digital
rights management for Tapwave-specific applications to help combat
piracy. The digital-rights management (DRM) features do not cover
stand-alone media such as video or MP3 files; it's targeted
specifically at protecting applications. The DRM feature is driven by
verifiable user account that is tied either to a specific Helix
device or to a removable SDIO card with OS support for verifying
proof of ownership. The Communications API provides support for
communicating via the Bluetooth stack
Fathammer is one of Tapwave's partners, and the company is porting
their X-Forge 3D game engine to the Helix to provide platform and
device independence to game developers. X-Forge offers developers
benefits similar to Microsoft's DirectX with advanced 3D graphics
rendering, physics, collision detection and resolution, multi-player
gaming and multi-channel audio.
One of the problems with all versions of Palm OS to date is that the
Hotsync is limited to 64KByte executable binaries. This means that
without some clever jiggering it was difficult to create large
applications. Tapwave, realizing that modern 2D games require large
quantities of animated graphics and high-quality audio, has addressed
this by writing an encapsulation layer that addresses this problem
and allows the large binaries to be Hotsynced.
Palm OS 5 doesn't support native ARM executables; most applications
are compiled into Motorola 68000 assembly and then emulated via the
PACE layer. That effectively cripples the high-speed CPU, but
emulated applications will run faster than if they were executing on
a regular Dragonball processor. Palm made provision for
small "Armlets" that allow an application programmer to compile
individual functions into the more powerful ARM assembly code. There
are certain caveats to this though. First, Armlets cannot access
global data because the Motorola 68000 Dragonball and ARM9 core
address memory in different formats. There are also 16-bit and 32-bit
alignment issues to consider. Another problem is that even though new
Palm OS 5 handhelds use a version of the Palm OS API re-compiled to
ARM code for faster execution, to call a Palm OS function from an
Armlet, the call must pass through a thunking layer. That translates
the parameters to the function and then passes them through the PACE
emulation layer. It's also not possible to call any Palm OS function
from an Armlet that returns a memory pointer, as the memory format
will be different. Tapware has addressed many of these problems by
providing a wrapper executable that allows an programmer to create an
entire, ARM-only program that takes care of much of the messiness,
along with a proper direct call layer to enable ARM code to call
directly into the Palm OS API without going through a ARM-to-68000-to-
ARM thunking layer.
We briefly reviewed the Helix SDK and installed it onto a laptop and
then spent some time tinkering with the API. Plugging in a standard
Micrsoft Sidewinder joystick, we were able to try out Tapwave's demos
running on the tweaked Palm OS 5 simulator, and compile a test
program using Visual C++. They have changed the interface of the
application launcher to make it very ergonomic. Obviously the
difference between a simulator and the physical hardware is enormous,
especially when the simulator is running on a 3GHz laptop but knowing
how capable the first PlayStation was, and how fast an ARM9 clocked
at 200Mhz is coupled with an ATI Imageon 100, this will essentially
be a portable PlayStation.
Initial developer reaction has been positive but cautious. Many
people can see the juggernaut of Nintendo barreling down the highway
towards them and are afraid of committing resources to yet another
handheld that may suffer lackluster performance in the marketplace.
Another aspect that concerns developers and publishers is the rampant
piracy and ease with which it is done on the Palm OS platform. As the
Palm OS developer community is made up of small, agile development
teams, it may be that a large number of already established
applications and games will quickly appear on the Helix platform with
varying levels of support for the custom hardware. Tapwave has made
announcements that various publishers are working on titles but
anyone who's been around the game industry for any length of time
knows that "early agreements" mean very little, especially where a
new platform is involved.
Pas mal cette bébètte !!
TI-NSpire Pwned !
Thx ya all...thx ExtendeD.
...The rebirth of the community...
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