KSN@PSUVMB.BITNET (Peter A. Krupa) (10/21/87)
I was all ready to order my Atari 1040ST Color System, so I call the
store, only to find that they'd jacked all their prices up about $300!
They told me Atari had forced them to do it for the holidays, but I
don't know...
Anyway, I'm really considering getting a monochrome system instead.
I'm more interested in the finer resolution than color and games
(who needs their roommates bashing their computer playing PAC-MAN?).
Advantages to monochrome? Disadvantages? Opinions sought.
Also, I would like someone to give me a fairly technical review of
Personal Pascal. Right off the bat I'll need to know if it runs on
monochrome, but I'd also like to know how faithful it is to UCSD
(Pecan's Pascal suffered a true beating by some).
As an afterthought, is there a good monochrome font editor, and does
anyone have the Cyrillic font?
Oop ack.
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Spiny_Norman
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jpexg@mit-hermes.AI.MIT.EDU (John Purbrick) (10/25/87)
In article <22985KSN@PSUVMB>, KSN@PSUVMB.BITNET (Peter A. Krupa) writes: > > Anyway, I'm really considering getting a monochrome system instead. > I'm more interested in the finer resolution than color and games > (who needs their roommates bashing their computer playing PAC-MAN?). > Advantages to monochrome? Disadvantages? Opinions sought. > Spiny_Norman I have monochrome and wouldn't change. What bugs me is how many programs are written for color displays only, including some programs that don't use graphics. Anyway, it's easy enough to write software that figures out which display is in use and uses patterns instead of colors for its graphics. If you're a programmer rather than a games-player, you'll appreciate a high-res display. I've found that even a very good color monitor, like the NEC Multisync, produces monochrome text inferior to a modest monochrome screen, such as the amber monitor on a Leading Edge Model D. And the ST mono display is better than that, with a 70Hz non-interlaced refresh and 400*640 square pixels (PC-compatibles have 720*348--more than twice as many pixels in the X as in the Y dimension). Obviously, there are things that you'll never be able to do without color, but if your graphics call for drawing lines, naturally you'll want to get them as fine as possible. The Macintosh, of course, uses this philosophy (supposedly King Jobs said that if people had dense enough monochrome graphics they'd never miss color.) and the ST ("Jackintosh", as it used to be called) copied this with higher resolution.