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From: whelan@donald.wslab.Hawaii.Edu (Jerry Whelan)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: color NeXTstation (and Weight of Monitor!)
Keywords: color NeXTstation 16 bit
Message-ID: <9544@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 25 Sep 90 05:09:41 GMT
References: <5582@mace.cc.purdue.edu> <1990Sep24.053046.5143@wrl.dec.com> <444@news.nd.edu> <8072@milton.u.washington.edu>
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In article <8072@milton.u.washington.edu> wiml@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis) writes:
=> Well, my understanding is that there are only 4 bits per gun. Dithered,
=> no doubt. This seems sort of restrictive until you think about the
=> trouble you'd have coordinating color palettes across umpteen different
=> color windows, each with possibly completely non-overlapping palettes,
=> with new drawing going on all the time and realtime video thrown in to
=> boot. Look up palettes are a nice optimization but only if you know
=> ahead of time what's going to be on the screen -- which, in a
=> multi-window multi-process environment like a NeXT, you don't.

	As I understand it, the color slab has one of those new fangled JPEG
DACs which is smart enough to give each window its own 4096 colors,
regardless of what the other windows are doing.  I believe the JPEG chip
supports up to 256 windows, I don't know how many the NeXT implementation
supports, but 20 or so ought to be enough. 
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