bryan@mothra.cs.utexas.edu (Bryan Bayerdorffer) (04/09/88)
I've had a MicroWay flickerFixer installed in my 2000 for about a week now--here's a completely subjective review for those of you who are thinking of buying one. Price: $448 from Abel Supply. I don't know how many they have in stock; I got my order in 3 weeks before the announced release date, which, surprisingly, was only a week before the actual release date. Installation: Straightforward pop-in-the-board stuff. The aluminum angle bracket that holds the female DB9 video connector didn't quite line up with the cutout on the rear of the Amiga on one end, resulting in a slight twist of the board when the screws were inserted. I'm not worried about this twist, though; it's not nearly enough to break any traces on the board. I rewired the cable that came with my Sony MultiScan (not a Sony cable); for those without a soldering iron, it's a standard VGA pinout, I believe. The board comes with a little alignment tool and a disk containing a couple of IFF images, one of which is a test pattern. The idea is to put the test pattern up on the screen (just click the icon--uses uShow), and then tweak a little variable capacitor (resistor?) through a hole next to the DB9, until the picture stabilizes. I didn't do this, since mine worked right out of the box. I suspect this might be necessary for some single-frequency VGA monitors. The disk also contains morerows. Observations: Very stable, very sharp picture. I'm morerowed to the max, and the overscan works just like it always has. It's great having 55 lines of text without having to take an aspirin every 4 hours. Personally, I don't think that topaz 8 looks that squashed in 400 line mode, though I must admit that topaz 11 is a little more pleasing. The blocky appearance of low res (200 line) images takes some getting used to, but the improved sharpness and absence of intervening dark lines more than compensates. Here's something I'm surprised never to have seen mentioned in two years of discussion about deinterlacing. I know I should have though of it--in retrospect it seems obvious. The deinterlacer updates the screen image once every 1/60th second. The Amiga takes 1/30th second to update the display-- 1/60th for the even numbered scan lines, 1/60th for the odd ones. As a result, any object on the screen moving faster than 1 pixel every 1/30th second 'comes apart' into two images consisting of the odd and even scan lines of the object, one lagging behind the other by a distance determined by the speed at which the object is being moved. It doesn't take much to move faster than 1 pixel every 1/30th second, by the way. This is quite disconcerting, at first--I just wasn't expecting to see my mouse pointer undergo mitosis every time I moved it. There ought to be some way to shut off the deinterlacing. Doing this with some kind of utility program would cause the deinterlacer to take up a slot on the bus, as well as the video slot--a simple switch on the back would be a much better idea. Of course, this would work only with multifrequency monitors. ______________________________________________________________________________ /_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/_____/ |_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____| _No dark sarcasm in the classroom|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|___ |____Teachers leave the kids alone__|_____|_____|bryan@mothra.cs.utexas.edu___| ___|_____|_____|_____|___{ihnp4,seismo,...}!ut-sally!mothra.cs.utexas.edu!bryan |_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|_____|