ojs@fortune.UUCP (Oliver Sharp) (07/11/84)
[] I am looking into adding a monochrome graphics board into my system. It would be nice if it were Hercules compatible, so at present the best possibilities seem to be Hercules and AST. Does anyone know anything about the AST? I haven't seen reviews or anything, but it is supposedly out there. AST seems like a heads-up company, so this board looks pretty good. The extra serial port will come in handy. The Hercules is OK, but we have one at work and it has a little bit of flicker - a nuisance, but nothing serious. My main reason for getting the AST is the reputation of the company and the extra port. Anyone with any special praise/flames for other Monochrome graphics cards, send 'em on in. Thanx ........ Oliver Sharp {.......!fortune!ojs}
mark@cbhydra.uucp (07/12/84)
I have an STB graphics plus. This is a "we do both color and monochrome" board - I've used it with an Amdek 310A (IBM compatible) monochrome monitor and with a color composite monitor (my TV played through a VCR used as an RF modulator). It has good and bad points. The good news is it's very cheap. I bought it through PC network and I paid less than I would have to buy the official IBM monochrome only monitor card. It also got a favorable review in PC magazine - no flicker at all on the RGB board. It also comes with a very good RAM disk - this RAM disk is so good it fools not only PC DOS but also CPM/86 and Venix/86 into thinking there is a second floppy there. (Xenix and Coherent are not fooled.) And it will run regular color graphics on an IBM monochrome monitor (squashed vertically because the IBM monitor has 350 some odd lines, the color only 200.) And the parallel port can also be configured as a bidirectional port and used for two way communications with a similar port on another machine or as a hard disk controller. There is some bad news, however. You wanted Hercules compatibility, I gather that this isn't there. It's not very well made - the parallel port sticks out through an ugly hole in the back of the board, it doesn't come with the little plastic goobie to hold the front end of the board in place, and it just doesn't look as slick as the IBM or Quadram boards (the board has an overall copper tint rather than green, although this probably doesn't make any difference.) The composite port only outputs B/W, and when combined with the Microsoft Flight simiulator that only outputs color on the composite port (at least the version I got - there's a new one out that does RGB color but in spite of the blurb in my MFS telling me that sending in my warrantee card would get me a dirt cheap upgrade rate, they won't upgrade for less than the full price) it means you can't get color. Finally, for reasons I don't understand, it won't do monochrome graphics on the Amdek 310 or 310A monitor, even though they are supposedly IBM compatible. You just get a blank screen. I also called STB asking questions about such things and they aren't very helpful. However, if you've just bought a PC or XT and are looking for a quickie card to make the silly thing work, don't want to spend much money, and think you might want to upgrade to color later, the STB board is probably a good thing. The monochrome text mode works perfectly. (It fails IBM diagnostics, but so does my Quadboard.) I haven't tried color text or graphics but they are claimed (in the review) to work well with no flicker.
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (07/13/84)
I know why the STB graphics+ won't work on an Amdek monitor. And it's a bad sign (for the STB, not for the Amdek). The IBM monitor has no concept of a real sync rate; it tries to lock onto whatever is fed into it. Unfortunately, if you feed in "obscure" scan rates (like the STB does [they don't admit this except in the hard to obtain STB internal tech reference] you can damage the IBM monitor. Badly. On the other hand, the Amdek has a genuine phase-locked loop sync system, that prevents the monitor from going bonzo when faced with strange scan rates. Of course it won't lock onto those rates, but that's how it protects itself. Indications are that long-term use of the STB board in monochrome graphics modes with an IBM monitor could drastically shorten the lifetime of the monitor itself. --Lauren--