Mountain View, California-based Trident Microsystems Inc has announced its TVG9470 television accelerator – a 32-bit graphical user interface accelerator with flicker-free ouput to NTSC/PAL interlaced television monitors and recording devices. It links to personal computers through Peripheral Component Interconnect, VESA local and AT bridges. The RAM-based graphics accelerator is based on Trident’s TGUI9440 graphics engine. The TVG9440 acts to smooth adjacent lines and eliminate single horizontal lines on interlaced television monitors that have made televisions unsuitable for presentations run from personal computers in the past. It also incorporates interpolated vertical scaling so that no line data is lost because of NTSC or PAL television display formats. In addition to enabling computer applications to be viewed on a television set, the accelerator enhances graphics performance by supporting functions such as image and text transfer, line draw, rectangle fills and polygon fills, the company said. The engine also supports 256 raster operations for 8- and 16-bit per pixel graphic modes. It will cost $24 in 1,000-up quantities when it ships some time this quarter.
