BRACKENRIDGE%USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (12/09/83)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> I have been using the Hercules graphics board for the IBM PC for the last few weeks. The hardware is adequate but like most things for the PC there are myriad software packages most of them very good. I could wish for more resolution than 720 X 348 but that seems to be enough for a screen as small as the IBM display. In text mode the Hercules card appears to be identical to the IBM display. In graphics mode the display jumps around a bit when actually writing but seems to settle down when writing stops. I don't know much about how hardware works, but you get the feeling that things are a bit strained when a lot of activity is going on. Dave Farber mentioned in an earlier issue of INFO-IBMPC that the Hercules card wouldn't work with one of the Unix clones he is running on the PC. We have had no program that wouldn't work with the Hercules in text mode. ISI bought Hercules cards primarily because the accountants here use Lotus 123. An IBM-PC running Lotus can pay for its self in one week. I always find it amazing how accountants can make figures come out in their favor. Anyway they love the graphics and it gets them off the KL-10s so everybody is happy. The VLSI group needs Hewlett Packard graphics terminal emulation. The Hercules card has separate text and graphics memory and nearly identical resolution as a Hewlett Packard display. Dick Gillmann is updating his HP terminal emulator to use the Hercules cards. As a loaded PC is considerably cheaper than a HP graphics display this saves the VLSI project a bunch of money. Of course the VLSI people would like 1024 X 1024 8 color resolution, but this is still too expensive to give each researcher. I use the display to graph speech and signal processing spectra and had no problem converting existing graphics application programs to run on the Hercules card. We have both the Graph X from Hercules and Mouse Window from Metagraphics via Mouse Systems. These packages sell for $50 and $40 respectively. Graph X uses the BIOS INT 10 function. The normal graphics codes don't work. You must use codes 40-4E. It implements the usual set of graphics routines. Nothing terribly fancy here, but the interface through the INT call, while not the fastest in the world, is convenient as multiple programs can use these calls. The package also provides hard copy support which is configurable for other than the standard printer. Mouse-Window from Metagraphics and Mouse systems is really the Rolls Royce of graphics packages. It will determine whether it is running on a Hercules card or standard IBM monitor and configure all parameters correctly transparent to the user. You don't need to use the mouse. In fact I got an existing application up and running rapidly which did not use the mouse. This package has things like view-port scaling, flash fill of several different texture patterns, proportional spaced font support, and pushing and popping of graphic context. Of course this package is designed for Lisa or Star like mouse-graphic interaction, but it works fine for your normal scientific graphics applications. It is also very fast as the package is written in assembly language and designed so it is called at a fairly high level of abstraction so that scaling and clipping is done in the assembly language routines. Earlier we had experimented with the Orchid graphics card which came with the Halo graphics package. I believe this package can be modified to run on the hercules card. It lies somewhere between the GraphX and Mouse-Window packages in complexity. Hercules also provides software which modifies the standard IBM diagnostics so they can cope with the non standard display as well as a modification to the Basic interpreter. I haven't used these programs, but believe modification of existing color graphic basic programs would be more trouble that it is worth. In summary the Hercules card is only a $200 addition to the total system cost of a PC and can add a great deal of capability for a wide range of applications. It is becoming standard issue here at ISI and I hope to see some mouse bit mapped graphics software evolve. I also would like to see Microsoft's Word support this card as it seems to be evolving as the monochrome graphics standard. -------