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From: dougp@voodoo.ucsb.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Proliferation of graphics modes
Message-ID: <3596@hub.UUCP>
Date: 16 Jan 90 05:26:27 GMT
Sender: news@hub.UUCP
Organization: UC, Santa Barbara. Physics Computer Services
Lines: 47

-Message-Text-Follows-

There is a way to get 4096 colors on screen at once with no limitations
in high res.

It requires a hacked up video cable, three Amigas, and two genlock, but
some people already have that :->

The Idea is to use the one Amiga without a genlock as a master, and use
the other two synced to the first Amigas video (via their genlocks) as
slaves.

Use the green output from the master, the red and blue from the slaves,
and connect them all to one monitor.

Use a paint program on each computer in high res with the palet set to
a 16 level grey scale and start painting. 

It's a bit inconvinient since you must use a different mouse for each
color, but you are getting 4096 colors in high res, and you don't even
have to interlieve bits in the bit planes like HAM-E :->

If you want to get fancy you could write your own paint program which
used a serial, parallel, or joystick port network to controll the slave
computers so you would only need to use one mouse.


Speaking of a new graphics format, There seem to be a lot of those
lately Dynamic HAM, Dynamic High res, Ham-E, etc.

Perhaps rather than making the editor or slide show program know how
to handle all of these, we could make it possible for the program, if
it did not understand a new format, to come up with a reasonable 
approximation of the image.

If a block in the IFF file contained code in a high leval interpreted
language (say based on C) to convert the bit plains included in the
IFF file into a 24 bits/pixel bitmap. The program could then take this
bitmap and convert it into something it can handle.

This has the side benefit of alowing other machines to save in the IFF
format useing whatever bit maping is convienient to the particular
machine, and still being able to display an approximation of that 
picture on any other machine that has an IFF viewer which handles
the code block.

Douglas Peale