July 2002

More Details on the Elimination of VM Labs
7/26/2002 by K3V

Yesterday, Genesis Microchip released a report of their first quarter financial results, in which they provided more details on the specifics with VM Labs. The full press release can be viewed here, but below are the excerpts relevant to VM Labs:

The company announced today that it has discontinued its development of products initiated by VM Labs for the DVD player market. Approximately 40 positions have been eliminated as a result of this decision.

The company acquired audio and MPEG decoding technologies from VM Labs through a bankruptcy proceeding in March 2002. At that time, it hired a number of former VM Labs employees to continue development work on certain VM Labs products.

"We continue to view these technologies as an extremely valuable part of our overall technology portfolio, well-suited for use in emerging video and consumer display markets. However, we made a strategic decision to discontinue the development work on the specific products initiated by VM Labs," said Mr. Donegan.

Pro forma net income differs from loss according to generally accepted accounting principles. A schedule reconciling these amounts is included in this news release. Differences include the exclusions of operating costs of VM Labs operations, severance costs, the amortization of acquired intangible assets and of deferred stock compensation expense, imputed interest on lease obligations and related income tax adjustments.

The company expects to incur operating expenses for VM Labs operations of $0.7 to $0.8 million in the second quarter of fiscal 2003, as well as restructuring costs of approximately $0.6 million to $0.8 million.

VM Labs Terminated
7/25/2002 by K3V

I have been informed that VM Labs has been officially terminated, and all employees have been laid off. An anonymous email I received stated:

"It will be interesting to see what happens to NUON since Genesis yesterday fired EVERYONE from Vm Labs who was working on the project and killed the whole division. Try to give anyone a call if you don't believe me. Everyone from Richard Miller on down."
No word on whether or not this will affect the NUON DVD players currently slated for release from RCA/Thompson or not, or whether NUON processors will be used in other future DVD players.

More on this as it becomes available.

NUON Emulator 0.1.0 Released
7/25/2002 by K3V

Riff posted this news to the NUON-Dome Forum today, announcing the release of version 0.1.0 of his NUON emulator:

I'm pleased to announce the release of the first minor version of the Nuon emulator. This release brings working controller emulation, several instruction set fixes and most importantly, DMABilinear support. Enough BIOS functions are available to create homebrew demos that will also run on real Nuon hardware. Included with the new release are two demos. The first is a simple joystick test which clears the screen in different colors based on the current button state. The second demo is a cellular automata demo that I threw together after buying Stephen Wolfram's latest book A New Kind of Science. Source is included for both demos along with prebuilt COFF executables. Please read the readme.txt file for the latest instructions.

You can get the new release at the usual location: http://tripoint.org/riff/nuon/nuonem.zip

New Forums Online
7/21/2002 by K3V

We're happy to report that we've got a new set of (much faster!) forums online. Thanks to The Helper and Chile, these new forums should serve the NUON community much better than the ones hosted here on NUON-Dome. You can get to the new forums at this link until I get a chance to update all the Forums links in the GUI. Enjoy!

Decaying Orbit Coming to NUON
7/19/2002 by K3V

DragonShadow Industries, the entity behind the recent upgrades to PacMan for NUON have begun the process of porting their original title, Decaying Orbit, to NUON. The game was originally written for the Sony Playstation using the Net Yaroze development system, but has been compiled for NUON and is undergoing the debugging and porting process. Here's what the developer has to say about progress so far:

"I made the first steps to porting Decaying Orbit to NUON. I copied over the directory structure and tried to compile it. After fixing a few fatal makefile and include file problems it compiled normally. That is to say with hundreds of errors. Now begins the long slog going through and fixing them. After that I'll need to write my own functions to emulate all the Yaroze library functions. Let's hope all of this doesn't take two years like it did originally."
You can read more about Decaying Orbit on the Official Site where you can learn what the game is all about, view screenshots, read strategy and more.

New Photos of NUON Goodies
7/18/2002 by K3V

I've added a new group of photos to the Media Page of some unusual NUON items such as a Project X bag, NUON Sunglasses, NUON literature and more. Check it out in the Misc. section of the Media Page or hit the links below:

Sunglasses, Magnetic Paperweight, Project X Bag 1, Project X Bag 2, Project X Bag 3, NUON Pen, NUON literature, press releases, folders, lanyards and more.

Official DRC300N Page
7/16/2002 by K3V

RCA has put up a page of information about the DRC300N on it's website, which you can get to directly by clicking here. They make the NUON features the highlight of the player, of which my personal favorite is: "Only Nuon Enhanced DVD Players have the Virtual Light Machine delivering 'Music at the speed of light!'"

Be sure to check out the page for a larger image of the machine, and to read the other details. Let's hope for a page of info on the DRC480N soon.

A preview page for the DRC300N has been set up here on NUON-Dome. Click here to check it out.

New RCA NUON DVD Player Revealed!
7/4/2002 by K3V

In a recent press release, RCA announced a second NUON-Enhanced DVD player in addition to the DRC300N. This time it's the progressive scan incorporating DRC480N. Here's the scoop:

Providing a dramatically crisp picture, RCA DVD model DRC480N incorporates Faroudja Directional Correlational Deinterlacing (DCDi) progressive scan technology that produces smoother and more natural images while eliminating jagged edges on interlaced video. This full-featured progressive scan DVD player also has an mp3PRO decoder that supports playback of CD-quality mp3PRO music files. Nuon Technology inside the player enables a number of new features such as full scale zoom from 0.5x to 15x, Smart Resume (that remembers where disc playback stopped on up to 10 discs), voice enhancement (that brings up the dialogue during noisy background scenes), and Virtual Light Machine (that creates colorful images on the television screen to complement the type of music being played on a CD or mp3 disc.) The Nuon processor also provides additional JPEG viewing options including simultaneous mp3 and JPEG playback (for adding music to the picture show), navigation of JPEG and mp3 files in the same directory, zoom and pan of JPEG images, and rotation of JPEG pictures by 90, 180 and 270 degrees.

Model DRC480N, with a new slim-design cabinet, has one set of gold A/V composite jacks, a component video output, S-Video and optical and coaxial digital output jacks. Model DRC480N will be available in August. The suggested retail price is $249.

RCA DVD model DRC300N is the second player with mp3PRO and Nuon Technology and has the same Nuon processor powered features as the DRC480N such as full-scale zoom and special music and photo effects. This unit also has a jog shuttle control for fast forward and reverse and 30-minute auto off. Connections include two sets of composite video outputs, component video output, S-Video output, headphone jack with volume control and optical and coaxial digital audio output jack. Model DRC300N will be available this summer. The suggested retail price is $199.

Forums Are Back
7/4/2002 by K3V

Well, as luck would have it, the server that NUON-Dome resides on was changed while I was off on my honeymoon, which left the Forums (and my CGI news program) crippled. Luckily we've been able to get things back in order so the forums should be fully functional again. Please let me know if you run into any issues, and I apologize for the downtime!