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From: n8541751@unicorn.cc.wwu.edu (Where there is darkness, light)
Newsgroups: comp.multimedia
Subject: Re: IBM InfoWindow
Message-ID: <1991Jan18.080626.16657@unicorn.cc.wwu.edu>
Date: 18 Jan 91 08:06:26 GMT
References: <1991Jan17.150619.6272@intelhf.hf.intel.com>
Organization: Monkey Tree Computer Services
Lines: 34

patti@hose2.hf.intel.com (Patti Beadles) writes:

>In a past life, I did programming for a company that did a lot of 
>interactive video development using the IBM InfoWindow.  Since then,
>I've sort of lost track of multimedia in general, and IBM's role in
>particular.

>I'm curious as to whether or not anything interesting has happened
>with the InfoWindow.  Has it gone through any major changes?  

IBM has come out with a board for MCA machines (Models 50 and up) which
lets you overlay video on a regular VGA monitor like the 8513. 

The board itself is really good, but the software that comes with it is
InfoWindow compatible.  For some reason, they kept the same scheme of
communicating with it, involving a complex relation of commands and
responses, as the InfoWindow.  The basic operation of sending a command
still involves building a large command string, full of oddities such
as long signed integers, and words with the high byte sometimes preceeding
the low byte, and other times following it, which are not convenient from
most high level languages.

You can run old InfoWindow applications on it, and you can create your
own new ones which use more commands and do more and better things, but
your stuck with an InfoWindow type interface to the new board, at
least for now.  The hardware itself is really good, and I've seen some
beautiful applications run on it, but the software to control it
is, at best, cumbersome.

Kris Bruland.
-- 
Kriston M. Bruland          |    . .         . .      . . .      .       . .
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