anderson@csli.Stanford.EDU (Steve Anderson) (08/15/90)
(I tried posting this before from a local site, but it doesn't seem to have made it off campus. Sorry if you see more than one copy.) Among the discussions I've seen of potential incompatibilities between A/UX and various hardware products, I haven't seen any mention of this one, so I thought I'd provide another data point. I bought a SuperMac ColorCard/24 for my IIci with Apple monitor because it offered (a) a hardware-implemented virtual screen the size of a 19" monitor, and (b) the opportunity to add an accelerator if I found myself using 24-bit color to any great extent. Unfortunately, I also want to run under A/UX. The ColorCard/24 implements the virtual screen by catching a signal on mouse events to make it possible to pan across the frame buffer. Unfortunately, A/UX doesn't pass this signal on to the card. If you try to use the virtual screen under A/UX, what happens is that mouse events just produce alerts to the console window, and you can't pan. Apple's Technical Answerline suggested that this could be fixed in software (firmware?) by SuperMac, but with the strong implication that Apple had no intention of doing anything about the resulting incompatibility. SuperMac, in turn (both directly over the phone, and in email from their representative on the net) has suggested they have no plans to do anything about it either. My impression was that they see A/UX users as representing too small a segment of their market to make it worth their while to re-engineer their product. Of course they may be right, but A/UX would seem to be an environment where the extra screen real estate provided by the ColorCard/24's virtual screen would come in especially handy. I am also told that the QuickDraw accelerator for 24-bit color is equally incompatible with A/UX (makes sense, given how touchy A/UX is about anybody else talking directly to the hardware). This means that the two potential advantages of this card over some other 24 bit video cards are absent in the A/UX environment (though you can of course still use it as an ordinary 640x480 card in 8 bit or unaccelerated 24 bit modes, and in the other ways with the base MacOS). People interested in A/UX should probably spend their money on other things. Steve Anderson Cognitive Science Center The Johns Hopkins University anderson@sapir.cog.jhu.edu