Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!ames!sgi!maverick
From: maverick@cl2devy.SGI.COM (Steve Whitney)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: dedicated vs general-purpose CPUs
Summary: Atari _has_ released its blitter
Message-ID: <18770@sgi.SGI.COM>
Date: 9 Aug 88 20:37:31 GMT
References: <5254@june.cs.washington.edu> <76700032@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <4438@cbmvax.UUCP>
Sender: daemon@sgi.SGI.COM
Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc, Mountain View, CA
Lines: 13

In article <4438@cbmvax.UUCP>, jesup@cbmvax.UUCP (Randell Jesup) writes:
...
> ...or the chip was seen as a stopgap, and is thus often very
> simple, and doesn't help with much.  An example is the (still not released,
> I believe) Atari blitter.  It was just a rectangle-copy chip, no special ops,
> nothing else...

Atari has released its blitter.  It's included in all of the Mega computers.
It is my understanding (and I may be wrong) that the blitter does line 
drawing and area fills as well as block copies.  In fact, the latest 520
and 1040 ST boards have sockets for this blitter.

			--Steve