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From: altman@tharr.UUCP (Hugo Fiennes)
Newsgroups: eunet.micro.acorn,comp.sys.acorn
Subject: Re: Graphics boards
Keywords: graphics boards
Message-ID: <1511@tharr.UUCP>
Date: 16 Dec 90 18:36:48 GMT
References: <5711@ecs.soton.ac.uk> <1990Dec12.123723.15587@maths.tcd.ie>
Reply-To: altman@tharr.UUCP (Hugo Fiennes)
Followup-To: eunet.micro.acorn
Organization: Power Microsystems Ltd
Lines: 37


Yes the graphics board *does* exist and the spec has been considerably
enhanced - it will go into production in January. The spec is:

640x256x256 with fully definable palette (SWIs will set palette at
frame rate if needed, so you can have nice fades). Genlock-able.
Modified colourtrans supports the extra colours, but does not support
setting of them. An example of this is defining palette to grey levels
(+ normal desktop colours) and loading the 256-grey level 'gradtint'
file from Impression into !Draw - it is displayed perfectly. Desktop
works as if you were in Mode 15. Higher resolutions available (highest
requires a multisync).

Two other modes are supported - 12 bit and 16 bit mode. Resolution is
down on the 8-bit modes, but allows full 4096 or 65536 colours on screen
simultaneously (halve that to have an overlay plane for genlock).

Software provided: New colourtrans/spriteutils (modified from Acorn-
supplied source), SWIs to set/read palette entries, CLEAR format read/
write (basically, to import nice GIF files with big palettes so we
can look at nice pictures!).

Several companies have requested prototypes for software development
including Computer Concepts (grey levels for DTP!), Clares (art),
Acorn, etc.

Hope this news is encouraging! :-)

Also, my terminal package ARCterm 7 is now out, it does x/y/zmodem, sealink
and Kermit has scripts and a good VT100 amongst other things.

Hugo

-- Hugo Fiennes ---------------------------------------------------------------
-- "HAL, you're not IBM compatible..."
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