Los Angeles, California-based Nichimen Graphics Inc has joined the rush to convert its game development software from Unix to the less expensive Windows NTplatform. It has signed an OEM customer agreement with Intergraph Computer Systems to move its N-World software to NT to offer developers more cost effective development environment, Intergraph said. It follows its competitor, MultiGen, who ported its GameGen games development environment to the NT platform last year. N-World is best known as the game package that was used to develop Nintendo’s Super Mario 64. The conversion to NT reduced the cost of a modeling seat to around $15,000, compared to $90,000 for Unix-based modeling, said Alvin Brown, marketing manager at Intergraph Corp. In addition, Nichimen is licensing Intergraph’s RenderGL open graphics library to incorporate into future releases of its new Windows NT-based software. RenderGL uses OpenGL to accelerate the rendering of complex images, up to fifty times faster than native software rendering, according to Intergraph. Nichimen engineers have spent the past nine months using Intergraph TD and TDZ 3D graphics workstations to convert three key products of the N-World package: N-World and N-Paint 3D along with exporting tools to VRML 2.0 and DirectX. The applications will be marketed under the brand name of Fast Track. The 12-year-old Nichimen company is owned by the giant trading company Nichimen Corp of Japan, which is a $62.5bn company.