davet@cmi.com (David Temkin) (06/24/91)
I guess this is message is meant for people at Apple and other companies who produce video circuitry for the Mac. Last week I was at MacHack in Ann Arbor, and someone who would know indicated that Apple might be dropping the two-bit (four color) mode from the built-in video in its new machines. I genuinely hope this doesn't happen. I have a stereo 3D animated graphics application under development which works very well in two-bit mode. While it can work in other modes (4 and 8 bit), it is far less efficient, and the animation is therefore considerably less effective. The specific technique used to attain the stereo effect basically depends on this video mode -- it uses a four-color CLUT and ORs two images together to attain stereo animation for use with red/green 3D glasses. I just wanted to point that there's at least one good reason to retain this mode. Up to this point all color Apple video cards, including all of the built-in color video circuitry, has supported four-color mode, and I hope that this remains the case -- four-color mode is far from useless. (And so are indexed video modes -- direct video modes severely restrict animation, and not only because the images require so much memory). If you have any questions, please send email. David Temkin Center for Machine Intelligence, EDS Corp. One Cambridge Center, Suite 408 Cambridge, MA 02142 617-225-0095 davet@cmi.com