MEDIAQ CHIP ACCELERATES GAME ON SONY CLIE

MediaQ MQ-1100 Platform Controller Chip Delivers Smooth, Flicker-Free Animation for Red Mercury's Popular Atom Smash Game

SANTA CLARA, Calif., September 10, 2001 - MediaQ, Inc., and Red Mercury Labs today announced that MediaQ's MQ-1100T Platform Controller Chip accelerates the graphic performance of Red Mercury's high-speed breakout-style video game Atom Smash 2.0 on Sony Clie handheld computers based on the Palm operating system. As a result, game players experience smoother, more realistic flicker-free animation on the high-resolution color screen. With its full-featured 64-bit 2D Graphics Engine, the MQ-1100 supports direct hardware acceleration of graphics tasks required for video games on handheld devices, such as copying bitmaps from system memory to video memory and erasing solid rectangles.

After running a battery of tests, game developer Red Mercury verified that Atom Smash runs up to five times faster on the Sony Clie using MediaQ's MQ-1100 controller than on other Palm OS handheld computers. The performance improvement is even greater because the Sony Clie supports a much higher display resolution than other Palm OS-based PDAs (320x320 versus 160 x 160), which means four times as many pixels are controlled by the MQ-1100 chip.

"Thanks to Red Mercury, end users can finally see for themselves the real difference the right graphics capabilities can make in a PDA," said Venkat Puntambekar, senior product marketing manager at MediaQ. "We strongly encourage other developers to try running their own software applications on the MQ-1100 and note the difference in performance. We believe that users will ultimately gravitate towards and reward those vendors who pay attention to graphics performance."

"These tests confirm that end users really do benefit substantially from having better graphics technology in their handheld computers," said Scott Corley, president of Red Mercury. "As developers, we appreciate knowing that our video games will be viewed and played the way they were meant to be. That's why we decided to create a hardware-accelerated version of the Red Mercury Graphics Library for use in all Red Mercury games."

Key Results

Below are the results of tests conducted by Red Mercury Labs comparing the performance of Atom Smash running on software versus the MediaQ MQ-1100. In the most extreme example, the Erase test took 240 seconds to run in software mode, but took just 2.9 seconds in MQ-1100 mode.

Optimized Software
MQ-1100 Accelerated
Speed Increase

Large Blit
498,700 pixels/second
2,630,300 pixels/second
5.2x

Small Blit
383,200 pixels/second
917,500 pixels/second
2.3x

Erase
1,062,700 pixels/second
87,671,200 pixels/second
82.4x

Font
277,100 pixels/second
1,126,900 pixels/second
4.0x

Both MediaQ and Red Mercury will document the test results on their respective Web sites.

MediaQ MQ-1100/1132
The MediaQ MQ-1100/1132 Platform Controllers redefine the end-user experience on handheld computers that utilize the PalmT and other operating systems. The MQ-1100 integrates a 64-bit 2D graphics engine, direct LCD display interface, and a USB device controller. The MQ1132 additionally incorporates USB Host, I2S audio Codec interface and a serial peripheral interface (SPI) for touch panel or MMC/SD cards. Both devices integrate 256 KB of Embedded SRAM. The devices support glue-less interface to popular CPU architectures including the Motorola Dragonball series, Intel SA-1110 and XScale series, the Hitachi SH-7750 and SH-7709, and the NEC VR-41xxT family processors.

About Red Mercury
Red Mercury, LLC was founded in November of 1999 to make games for handheld devices. All Red Mercury games are free to try. Demonstration versions of all Red Mercury games, including Atom Smash, are available for download from http://www.red-mercury.com and at PalmGear.com by clicking here.

About MediaQ
MediaQ, Inc., develops highly integrated semiconductors and accompanying software for key segments of the growing market for wired and wireless Internet appliances, including handheld computers, web terminals, and Smart Phones. The company's core technologies enhance visual display capabilities, improve connectivity, and minimize power consumption. Current customers include NTT DoCoMo, Hitachi, JVC, NEC, Nokia, and Siemens. Founded in 1997, MediaQ is a privately held company headquartered in Santa Clara, CA. Additional information about MediaQ is available at 408-733-0080 or by visiting http://www.mediaq.com.

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2001 MediaQ, Inc. Red Mercury and Atom Smash are trademarks of Red Mercury, LLC. All other products or service names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.