drwho

A friend of mine is getting rid of his Zodiac. He has offered to give it to me or else he will eBay it. Are there any things which the Zodiac can do which my TX can't? Or things which it does better? I don't want to take it if it will be no use to me: I have enough stuff cluttering the house already.

_Em

The zodiac is generally better at playing games due to the button layout. It also has a graphics coprocessor and 2 SD slots (one of which is SDIO); you can put a WiFi card in one slot and a 2GB card in the other.

If you don't want it, I'd be happy to take it off your hands

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My Palm family:
Palm T|X ~ Palm T|E ~ m130 ~ m125 ~ POSE

icefireicefire

@_Em: what palm(s) do you have?

+the zodiac can to fullspeed DVIX video underclocked, because the graphics chip helps.

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dmitrygr

no it cant because no player uses hardware acceleratin for decoding since ati will not produce the docs for this

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My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc...
Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com

robitaille88

But doesn't TCMP have a Zodiac plug-in for hardware acceleration?

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icefireicefire

Yes it does, it uses the Tapwave API, IIRC.

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dmitrygr

it only uses it to stretch video, not to decode anything, sorry

__________________
Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software

My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc...
Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com

icefireicefire

Really? Then my zodiac must have some super-processor because i don't even need the processor (underclocked to ~33 mhz) to use CorePlayer for DivX

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dmitrygr

divx itself is not hard to decode...

__________________
Annoying me is NOT an approved way of encouraging me to produce software

My software:PowerSDHC, PowerDrive, nuRom, UDMH, warpSpeed, PowerDiGi, brightnessFix, etc...
Get it all here:http://www.PalmPowerups.com

icefireicefire

Well that explains it! Thanks!

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Cyker

Some docs for the ATI Imageon chip are available; Not specifically for the Zod's one I think, but a very similar chip is also used in many PPCs and picard used those docs to create the driver.

Now, the Imageon chip has a hardware MPEG4 (*Not* H.264!) decoder built into it, and Tapwave were going to release an update to add support for it on the Zod (but then they went under ).
picard's driver uses that decoder, and it really does hardware decoding for MPEG4-type streams (e.g. MPEG4, DivX, XviD) on the Zod2, which is why it can decode MPEG4 streams much smoother than a T|3 despite having half the processing power.
This is also why you might notice MPEG1 and MPEG2 streams being choppier than MPEG4 on the Zod's TCPMP, despite them being less CPU intensive codecs.

There are options in TCPMP for using the chip for full hardware decoding, scaling and rotation only, or full software decoding only.

(I just wish my TH55 had such a chip! Alas its GE2D chip can only be used for rotation and scaling, and nobody's figured out how to reprogram the TH55's DSP. )


The other cool things about the Zod are that:
1) It has 128MB 'Real' RAM (As opposed to the fake RAM in NVFS Palms); That's twice more than the next largest PalmOS unit!
2) You don't need UDMH to run anything because it has the biggest stack space of any PalmOS unit!
3) It's approved by the Stargate SG-1 team!