RasterOps Inc, which changed its name to that of its Truevision Inc acquisition at the end of last year, decided that the cash it could get for the RasterOps name would do it more good than retaining the name for a high-end graphics line of products, and so it was sold to a group of entrepreneurs who came together at beginning of the year to operate in the video accelerator, color display and color management device end of the Macintosh market. They were therefore able to name their Englewood, Colorado-based vehicle RasterOps Technology Corp. It includes Barry Atkins from Zycom Corp as president and chief executive and Chris Peterson from Radius Inc as vice-president, worldwide sales and marketing. First product, shipping this month, is a line of Opticolor 128 PCI bus graphics accelerators for the Power Macintosh based on Lexington, Massachusetts-based Number Nine Visual Technology Corp’s Imagine 128 board. Imagine has a 128-bit graphics engine and internal processor data path, and 128-bit data bus between the graphics processor and on-board graphics memory. It is claimed to transfer data to 4Mb or 8Mb of fast video RAM at sustained drawing bandwidths of over 500Mb per second, so can concurrently process 16 8-bit, eight 16-bit or four 32-bit pixels in a single instruction. RasterOps plans to add monitors and color management enhancements before October.
