Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!killer!chasm
From: chasm@killer.DALLAS.TX.US (Charles Marslett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Vga Boards, and Seiko's new monitor
Summary: Windows and VGA boards
Keywords: vga,graphics,windows,video-7,stb,wonder,fastwrite,monitor,seiko
Message-ID: <8512@killer.DALLAS.TX.US>
Date: 2 Jul 89 14:31:29 GMT
References: <2565@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM>
Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas
Lines: 67

In article <2565@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM>, rogerson@PEDEV.Columbia.NCR.COM (Dale Rogerson) writes:
> 
> I am in the market for a cheap VGA adapter.  I have lowered my sights from
> 800x600x256 to 800x600x16 ( I would still like the option to upgrade).  
> Probably the most important feature I need is Windows/286/386 support. 
> The current board of choice seems to be the Video-7 V-RAM, but this is just too
> expensive for me.  What about the Video-7 FASTWRITE VGA board?  I have not seen
> any reviews of it in the magazines.  Anyone know anything about it.  The
> ads say that it will do 800x600x16 and that you can expand it from 256k to 
> 512k.  Can it then display 800x600x256?

To the best of my knowledge, the V7 Fastwrite card is functionally equivalent
to the VRAM card except where the additional speed of the VRAM card is
necessary for some function (perhaps the 1024x768 non-interlaced mode, or
perhaps the 800x600 256 color mode, but I really doubt it -- maybe someone
from Video 7 will clear this up).  If I had to say, I would expect the
Fastwrite to do 800x600 256 colo just as easily as it does 640x480 and I
believe I have seen that advertised.

> The STB boards seem to have great Windows drivers,  according to the last
> PC magazine the STB board was slow *except* when running Windows.  We have
> a VGA Wonder here at work and it does not hav a Windows/386 driver and only
> one Windows/286 driver.

(I work for STB, doing VGA BIOSes among other things, and I can say that our
Windows drivers are mostly provided by Tseng Labs so other Tseng based cards
-- say the Orchid Designers and Genoa's Tseng based card -- should have
more or less the same set.  We do have a slightly buggy Windows/386 driver
we have substituted for a slightly buggier one from Tseng that is uniquely
STB's, but the next generation driver from Tseng looks good enough that we
will be distributing it unchanged.)

Actually, the reason we are somewhat slower than other Tseng cards is not
necessarily a good-vs-bad issue.  You can get a significant (30%?) performance
increase by selecting a higher percentage of video memory cycles to be assigned
to the processor and a lower percentage to be assinged to the video refresh
logic.  This works well in a DOS environment (Tseng Labs reccommends it, I
believe), but if you try o support protected mode environments you then
have to either insure the faster clocks are not selected (no 800x600 or
1024x768) or insure the protected mode driver turns off fast mode for you
when he leaves text mode.  

Needless to say, we went for slow but sure, though if we get enough flak
we will change.

> While we are talking about VGA, has anyone seen that new monitor by Seiko 
> (CM-1430)?  It has a dot pitch of .26mm and lines instead of dots. 

Yes, its on my desk right now.  I still like it a lot, but it has a "feature"
that is causing me a lot of pain:  if even one horizontal sync pulse is dropped,
and this is very possible in a mode change, the monitor goes into a forced
640x??? mode (31 KHz horizontal sweep rate) for about 7 seconds.  The symptom
is that when entering the 1024x768 resolution modes with most video cards that
support that mode the screen wraps horizontally for about 7 seconds!

Otherwise, it is a great fixed frequency monitor (obviously, you do not get
800x600 256-color displays, but if 1024x768 16-color and 640x480 are sufficient,
I would still reccommend it).

> -----Dale
> 	Rogerson-----

===========================================================================
Charles Marslett
STB Systems, Inc.  <== Apply all standard disclaimers
Wordmark Systems   <== No disclaimers required -- that's just me
chasm@killer.dallas.tx.us <== soon to be attctc.dallas.tx.us I think