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From: milne@ICS.UCI.EDU (Alastair Milne)
Newsgroups: comp.ivideodisc
Subject: Reactions to IBM M-Motion system?
Message-ID: <9102160028.aa18849@ICS.UCI.EDU>
Date: 16 Feb 91 08:30:16 GMT
Lines: 79


    To network people:

    The project my group is working on is creating a highly interactive
    set of programs using IBM's new (a few months old, anyway) M-Motion video
    adapter for microchannel PS/2's.  It is intended, or so I understand
    to replace InfoWindow.  (For those who haven't heard of it, I describe
    it below.)  However, a few things about this arrangement concern me:

    - I have seen nothing mentioned about this system in the journals
      I follow, even though IBM has already released version 2 of its
      control software.  Am I simply looking in the wrong places, or is
      it really being generally ignored?  (I do know at least one group,
      Computer Teaching Corporation, has acknowledged it enough to have
      provided an InfoWindow emulator to run on top of it, so that CTC's
      InfoWindow-based packages could run on M-Motion.)

    - As far as I can discover, the M-Motion video adapter is being
      issued for microchannel only.  But microchannel seems to be gaining
      only very limited acceptance, at least on this side of the Atlantic.
      (Having had to shepherd a couple of PS/2's -- model 80 and 70 --
      for some months now, I am sympathetic to those who prefer to avoid
      the complications of MCA).

      Does anybody know if MCA is starting to look like a moderately
      realistic target environment, or is it remaining a small pool?

      Does anybody know if versions of M-Motion for none-MCA architectures
      are planned?

    - What other realtime video boards, whether for XT/AT-bus or for MCA,
      are competing with M-Motion?  The name VideoLogic has been mentioned
      to me, but I've heard no more of it than that.


    And for those who haven't heard of M-Motion, it is a video adapter
    board for IBM microchannel PS/2's that augments VGA with realtime
    input and display of a live video source, typically a videodisc player.
    (Actually, it can connect with up to 3 of them.)  A 3-component
    package of interrupt handlers called the M-Control program provides
    application programs with control of the board and the players,
    through interrupt 7fh.  So far I've found the documentation adequate
    to implement a reasonably versatile demo program in Turbo Pascal 5.0 .

    Under program control, the M-Motion system can shrink input images
    to virtually arbitrary size and locate them as desired on the screen;
    the whole source image or just a section of it can be read; and
    the images are displayed from a video buffer where they remain until
    overwritten, so multiple reduced images can be accumulated on the screen,
    with as many of them in motion as there are videodisc players
    connected.  Transparency and reading of the video source can be turned
    on or off, and the colour to be turned transparent can be set;
    selected areas of the screen can have protection set for graphics,
    video, or both.

    (NOTE: this is more than just documentation claims: I've been doing
    it all from Turbo Pascal, and without much difficulty.)

    You're also supposed to be abled to erase sections of the video
    buffer, and read 256-colour image files into it, but both are slow
    (the file reading is *very* slow).  At the moment, I use graphic protect
    to hide any area of video I don't want seen, rather than trying to erase it.

    Sound can be either channel, both, mixed, or silenced.  For those
    with tolerant ears, it can be played through the PS/2's speaker.
    It can also be buffered, re-played, saved to files, and recalled.
    (This I have not yet tried, but the M-Motion diagnostic program
    exercises it.)


    So if this sounds like another system you know of, please tell
    me about it.


    Thanks to all respondents,

    Alastair Milne,
    Technical Manager,
    Educational Technology Center