Press release received on Sat Oct 23 07:13:48 BST 2004, from the Aemulor team ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- For release not before 10am Saturday 23rd September 2004 Geminus project. Purley, Surrey. England. The team behind Aemulor, Aemulor Pro and Cino are pleased to announce their latest project : Geminus - a multiple-screen driver for the IYONIX pc. It allows several PCI graphics cards to be installed (upto the maximum number of free PCI slots-3 in current models) and your desktop can be split across several screens in various configurations. Features - provides screen modes which span multiple graphics cards, allowing the desktop to be used across two or more screens - supports up to 8 screens (Note: only 3 PCI slots are available for graphics cards in current IYONIX pcs.) - screens can be arranged in any configuration (left to right horizontally, right to left horizontally, vertically..) - each screen image can be rotated 90 degrees clockwise or anti-clockwise, allowing rotatable LCD panels to be used in portrait mode; great for DTP! - An API allows applications to create their own display surfaces (the desktop is just one display surface) and thus claim screens for their own, exclusive use, either drawing to them directly or via the OS VDU drivers. For example, Cino can take over the second screen for DVD playback, whilst the desktop is displayed in the first screen - makes full use of the hardware acceleration already available in RISC OS 5 on all screens, plus a hardware DMA channel to improve scrolling and copying performance between screens - graphical Configuration plug-in allows you to define your own large screen modes, specifying the screen positions and, optionally, rotations for each mode. Future Developments =================== Geminus doesnt just end there. We have a host of exciting features planned for the product, which will be made available in different "flavours" depending on which features you require. - R/B-swapping in software, allowing the use of other graphics cards which have not or cannot have their Red and Blue signals crossed-over (as per Castle's supplied NVidia cards), eg. digital DVI outputs. - low-colour modes (code to be migrated from Aemulor Pro into the Geminus module, allowing each physical screen to be used in any display depth, whatever its actual capabilities). - Geminus is ideally placed to further accelerate desktop operations such as sprite plotting and window redrawing. Some early prototype code has already proved that the plotting of texture backgrounds in particular can be greatly speeded up, leading to a noticably slicker desktop. Constraints The widths of the individual screens within a multi-screen mode are restricted slightly, as shown below: 16 million colours width must be a multiple of 256 pixels 32 thousand colours width must be a multiple of 512 pixels 256 colours width must be a multiple of 1024 pixels So all standard modes are available in 16 million colours (eg. 1024 x 768, 1280 x 1024, 1536 x 1152, 2048 x 1536) A couple of example desktop modes available with 2 CRT monitors side-by-side : 2560 x 1024 x 16 million colours 4096 x 1536 x 16 million colours!! The first public showing of Geminus will be at the Guildford RISC OS show today, where we will also be selling second PCI graphics cards suitable for installing into the IYONIX pc, and a range of LCD monitors at fantastic prices. We anticipate Geminus will be available for purchase 3-4 weeks after the show as much of the code is already complete. Pricing for the multi-screen version of Geminus will be 25UKP+vat Modified (R/B swapped) PCI graphics cards are available at 50UKP+vat Upon release, we will be offering various bundles of Geminus, PCI cards and LCD monitors at discounted prices. ENDS Cheers, /Neil/ -- Web design, hosting and domain registration http://www.spellings.net/