steveh@tasman.cc.utas.edu.au (Steven Howell) (05/11/91)
Well, the other week i set up a //e card in an LC to get farmiliar with it. Being an Apple II/III man myself from many years back i was keen to dragout my software collection and run this thing through its paces. Well, my results are not too good. I found a few points, mainly one, that made me decide, that i would not buy one of these cards if i did have an LC. The major problem was The Video Quality. I set up the LC with 512k VRAM and the SONY applecolor monitor (not the LC's monitor). This makes the LC look as if it was a mac II from the outside, damn good little units the LC. But, when i went into //e mode, i was horrified to see this ridiculous, how could they have done it, like video display. It is the lowest quality BLOCKY type display i have ever seen. My //e and a cheap Kaga RGB monitor absolutley slaughters it. The 80 column display looks like letters made in the GR mode, but blown up. I came to some conclusions to why the quality is this bad. The video on my //e is created thru an RGB card receiveing data from the //e's Bus and processing it into R, G, B logic signals. These signals are sent to the RGB monitor and are displayed as pixels. The pixels are round, and there for are well suited next to each other, as they create a blending effect. For example. a game called MARIO BROS, being executed on a //e, looks as if there were smooth shades of colours blending into each other, creating a good effect. BUT, on the LC the pixels have to generated diffrently, as the pixels on the LC monitor, especially the SONY mac II monitor, are of a greater density. if you displayed the //e output direct to the monitor, you would have a small picture of approx 4x5cm in size (this however would not work due to bandwidth).So they scale it up. But how they do it i dont know. Basically they replaced the apples //e's round pixels with blocky square pixels, and it creates a semi sort of miniture GR mode, that everything including text, is displayed in. Has anyone noticed this. Am i only being fussy. Is this only with the SONY monitor. Anyway, just a few points Id thought Id mention. see what happens ay' steve h