12 May
2006
12 May
'06
2 a.m.
> A large card ("Newport Graphics"?) but
appears that 4 RAMs (?)
>were not populated at initial manufacture (which suggests it
>is a lower-end card?)
Yeah. XL-8: 8-bit, non-accelerated video.
Not really "non-accelerated", just without geometry or a Z-buffer. XL video is
(of its generation) the fastest at 2-D tasks, noticeably faster than XZ.
Not sure against Extreme (you still have the pipeline overhead, but 2 REs on GU1).
In addition to the extra VRAM, there are several ASICs that are unstuffed on XL8- possibly
colormaps, I can't remember right now.
The chip under the heatsink is a REX-3 raster engine. It takes care of everything that
"accelerated graphics cards" for the PC
did and more. The CPU takes care of geometry and Z-buffer, coordinates are sent to the
card for raster operations.
On the back: the RCA is composite-in, the mini-DIN is S-VHS (Y/C) in. The
"bidirectional audio" is digital I/O
Jules Richardson wrote
Has anyone ever tried a wide SCSI controller in the
same physical machine as
the framebuffer? I don't think it'll work without case mods to make it all
physically fit, but I have no idea if it works from a software point of view...
I'm thinking that we've got a dead Challenge-S machine with a wide SCSI board
in it (where the framebuffer in a normal Indy would be)- I don't think there
are pass-through bus connectors on the SCSI board, but I *think* there are on
a framebuffer board, so the framebuffer could go below and the SCSI board
above it...
I believe there are wide SCSI GIO32 cards out there. I've never worked with a
Challenge, but in the Indy the mainboard -> graphics is a modified-connector GIO-64,
the expansion bus on top of the
framebuffer is GIO32-bis. I have no idea how they break up the channels (Indy can have
2xGIO32 + GIO64 graphics, whereas Indigo2 is limited to 2xGIO64 whatevers). I2 would
likely work out of
the box, since there are the 2x Fast-SCSI channels available. Of course, what they wanted
you to do is buy an Onyx . . . (I suspect that this is why the genlock disappeared when
they moved from
Express to IMPACT graphics in the Indigo2)