dave@micropen (David F. Carlson) (07/21/87)
Couple of things.
1). I noted with interest everex's microchannel (16bit apparently)
4 meg RAM card. As I buy everex 3 meg memory cards (16 bit AT bus)
now I was unpleasantly suprised to see the microchannel variety was priced
modestly at 3X the retail of the AT bus card. Yet another reason to pass
on PS/2!! (The 3X is 0k configured.)
2). This weeks EE Times notes that paradise has finished a VGA for clones
and will ship later in the summer. They compare that $60 chip with the 640X480
PGA card that is considered not the way to go these days. We use a $750 (!)
everex PGA card that does CGA and Hercules emulation too. It has a TI 34061
graphics chip and a '286 with 512 of program memory and 256K of ROM and 512K
of video RAM. Note that PGA has a high level command set and an off board
graphics processor to do the grunt work. (Actually, as the TI34060 has it's
own ROM there are two coprocessors.) What can VGA do in a gate array that
a dedicated '286 cranking a TI graphics engine can't do for you. If my main
CPU has to deal with fills, circles, bitmaps etc, I am not interested. (Multi-
user machines running Microport can't have the main CPU doing stupid things like
fills.) Now, how does the CAE market benefit from another dumb (EGA) standard
without hardware to make it fly? (The real big loser with PGA which has had
256 colors et al. for years now is that their is no way to scroll text on the
graphics screen. That hurts.)
If anyone is running Microport with an everex pga card, I have a driver mod to
allow ioctls on the console to switch modes and also enable F5 to bring up
yet another console: Hi res graphics at a touch. The everex card makes hires
a freeby in that only a location needs to be tweeked to bring it or emulation
up and the emulation screen contents are not lost. Real beauty. A reasonable
pga driver would be included.
Comments welcome.
David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc.
...!{seismo}!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave
"The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll
--
David F. Carlson, Micropen, Inc.
...!{seismo}!rochester!ur-valhalla!micropen!dave
"The faster I go, the behinder I get." --Lewis Carroll