FRIEDMAN@RU-GREEN.ARPA (08/18/84)
Apple has just released its own color monitor for the IIe. It comes with a board which fits in the auxiliary slot and does all the things a standard 80 column board does, as well as supporting Apple's monitor. Most importantly, it offers a number of NEW AND IMPROVED GRAPHICS MODES which really look great. Here are my impressions: THE MONITOR: The Apple Color Monitor 100 is a high resolution, high bandwidth (25 MHz!) RGB monitor. It compares very favorably with corresponding units from IBM and Princeton Graphic Systems. Text is very easy on your eyes, and there is no flicker. It displays all graphic and text modes available on the Apple (and a few new ones-- more on this later). An interesting switch on the monitor makes the display into a green monochrome display at any time. It also has a tiltable display comparable to that of the Apple Monitor II but is motor driven (cute but useless). Presumably this monitor works with the Apple //c but my documentation doesn't mention it. I read in ST.MAC that this will be the monitor used for Macs with color output (see interview in August issue). Its resolution would make it ideal (I can't wait!). THE CARD: The extended 80 column card with RGB output has several truly interesting features. It has some DIP switches that allow you to change the color of the text displays (40 and 80 column) to blue, green, amber, or white. (This is fully compatible with ALL software.) Graphics modes are displayed properly and CLEANLY. Even lo-res looks nice because the is no mixing of colors on the boundaries of blocks. Hi-res looks best with pictures on it, as opposed to text. The circuitry which generates the standard hi-res RGB display treats the screen as a color 140 X 192 display by default. The manual is sketchy about this and other things, but it may be possible to change this using softswitches. I am not sure whether the high bit shift is supported on the RGB monitor. Again, all software is compatible with the graphics modes. There is also a new text mode. It is a 40 column mode in which every character on the screen has one of sixteen foreground and background colors. The information on the colors is stored in text page 1X (alternate text screen 1). This mode is just touched on in the manual. Another mode which is entirely ignored in the manual but is demonstrated on the impressive demo disk is a hi-res "overlay with foreground/background and 40-column text". (Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks neat.) The most interesting modes by far, though, are the double hi-res modes. There are three possible ways to display the double hi-res screen on the RGB monitor: 1) 560 X 192 monochrome 2) 140 X 192 16-color with no restrictions on adjacent pixels' color 3) "Combined" modes 1 and 2. The demo disk also shows a "three color mode" but it looks to me like black, white, and grey. The mixed mode really works, even though I can't see how. The demo disk comes with documented ampersand software to plot on these screens and print toolkit-compatible fonts on the screen. Saving and loading of screens and fonts is also supported. If anyone has better technical info than I do, please post it. The manual is uncharacteristically incomplete, and it is my only source. -David Temkin Highland Park, NJ -------