miller-barbara@CS.YALE.EDU (Barbara Miller) (03/24/88)
Does anyone out there know whether there exists a device driver for the IBM Professional Graphics Adapter? If so, how might I go about getting a copy of it?
jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle) (03/25/88)
The IBM Professional Graphics Adaptor has been discontinued by IBM.
The unit was too expensive to achieve any significant market share,
and little software supports it. Since it contains a CGA emulator, though,
MS-DOS can support it in text mode, although the resolution is reduced from
the excellent PGA resolution to the terrible CDA resolution.
AutoCAD supports the PGA. So do Dr. Halo and packages based on
that library. But few other packages do; the Turbo family, for example, do
not. EGA and VGA are now the de-facto standards.
Matrox makes some very nice boards that emulate the PGA, and include
some other capabilities. Their most advanced board has a full solid modeller,
including a Z-buffer.jru@etn-rad.UUCP (John Unekis) (03/26/88)
In article <17373@glacier.STANFORD.EDU> jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle) writes: > The IBM Professional Graphics Adaptor has been discontinued by IBM. >The unit was too expensive to achieve any significant market share, ... Ibm has also withdrawn all stocks of the EGA board in order to prop up sales of the new VGA boards. Gosh, what are we to do? I guess we'll all just have to make do with boards from VEGA and Genoa that offer double the resolution at half the price. *sigh* what a shame.
pmw@foobar.hf.intel.com (Pat Walsh) (03/26/88)
The IBM PC Professional Graphics Adapter has several different flavors of device driver depending upon your application. Probably the most well-known is called GSS-Drivers - this is the basis of the IBM VDI product that was used when PGA was introduced. CAD and Graphics Board vendors have extended the original PGA instruction set and most applications of any size that use PGA-style [i.e. non-shared-memory] interfaces include their own 'driver' and 'CGI-like interface library' in the application. CGA/EGA/VGA provide direct bitmap access to the host CPU and potentially (actually) the application. PGA provides a 'high level' command stream interface and off-loads the interpretation. Low-end systems tend to use the shared memory architecture for cost reasons, and typically throw a faster CPU at the problem if things slow down. High-end systems tend to use the non-shared memory (functionally partitioned) architecture to provide dedicated computing resources for graphics operations. As usual, IBM rode the fence and introduced attempts at both architectures. The primary reasons PGA 'failed' in the PC were 1) cost advantage of EGA, 2) command interface was not fast enough (bytes transfered vs. operations performed), and 3) the interface was not flexible or 'rich' (text, line styles, etc) enough for most applications. Onwards to OS/2 Presentation Manager :=) -Patrick Walsh, (503)696-7216, Intel Corp; Hillsboro OR ...tektronix!psu-cs!foobar!pmw ...seismo!vrdxhq!verdix!omepd!littlei!foobar!pmw