Hydra System
In 2006 Andre LaMothe launched his new HYDRA Game Development Kit, a much more powerful system than the XGS Micro Edition. Unlike the other systems by Nurve, the Hydra does not carry the XGS branding. The Hydra uses the multi-core Parallax Propeller microcontroller, which has an architecture resembling the Cell microprocessor used in the PlayStation 3. The Propeller runs at 80 MHz and uses eight processor cores, called COGs, to reach a performance of 160 MIPS. It also has much more memory than the Micro Edition's SX52: 32K RAM and a 32K ROM which contains a bitmap font for the video display generator, (the Propeller can generate a high quality VGA or PAL/NTSC color picture using software and some special support logic built into each CPU core), tables for mathematical function, and an interpreter for the multi threaded SPIN language. Each CPU core also has its own 2K RAM (512 32bit words) of dedicated memory. For input, the system has two PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard (which are sold with the system) and two NES compatible game controller ports (one game controller is included). The system also has a mini USB interface for programming the system, an RJ-11 Ethernet port, and a 128K serial Flash EEPROM for storage. There are also add-ons, such as a 512K external RAM card.
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