JOHN@SRI-CSL.ARPA (John McLean) (11/17/85)
I was one of the purchasers of the Austin Franklin 80-column boards (about 2 years ago, as I recall. I had ordered and received one board but was sucessfull at getting it working only for about 1 hour. (The board "died" shortly after.) As I recall, the images were very clear and readable on my monitor. I don't have the documentation at hand, but I think that the characters were somehing like 6 or 7 pixels wide. Austin Franklin Associates went belly-up shortly after I received my card and therefore, I was unable to secure repair or refund of my purchase price (approx $300) from the company. And AF Associates wasn't willing to provide schematics so that I could troubleshoot my board. So I sent the board back and went through the legal procedures for getting my credit card company to refund my purchase price and go after AF Associates. (I did eventually receive a refund thru my credit card company.) The board had a direct video output (to the monitor) and (I assume) used some kind of FET switch to change from standard Atari video to 80 column video. I have been a user of the Omniview for about 1 year now and find it to be a very good product. Yes, the characters are a bit difficult to read and I'd rather use a terminal if its available. But the Omniview is a very clever modification to a machine that was never intended (by its designers) to be an 80 column text machine. John McLean Convergent Technologies 408-945-6776 -------