3 Dec
2007
3 Dec
'07
3:14 p.m.
One of these just sold on ebay item # 290186096576
I was looking at it because its graphics (I have no S-100 machines),
but even had I remembered to bid on it I would have been priced out
:-).
Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at all? It seems not.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
3:35 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
In article <4754920C.6080806 at jetnet.ab.ca>,
woodelf <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> writes:
Richard wrote:
In the 79-81 time frame I remember poring over the ads for machines in
BYTE on a regular basis. (I really wanted my own computer but couldn't
afford one.) I recall that Cromemco and SWTPC both had some sort of
graphics options, although the SWTPC one might have been from a 3rd
party. Cromemco had the "dazzler" card IIRC.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at
all? It seems not.
I think I have only seen about 3 ads for a S-100 graphics card.
5:11 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
On 03/12/2007 23:35, Richard wrote:
In the 79-81 time frame I remember poring over the ads
for machines in
BYTE on a regular basis. (I really wanted my own computer but couldn't
afford one.) I recall that Cromemco and SWTPC both had some sort of
graphics options, although the SWTPC one might have been from a 3rd
party. Cromemco had the "dazzler" card IIRC.
I have two Dazzlers, I think, and three Matrox cards for my Cromemco.
They're not particularly common, but my Cromemco came from someone who
supported various systems that needed graphics.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York
4:05 p.m.
Richard wrote:
One of these just sold on ebay item # 290186096576
I was looking at it because its graphics (I have no S-100 machines),
but even had I remembered to bid on it I would have been priced out
:-).
Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at all? It seems not.
Matrox S-100 graphics cards appear once in a while on ebay. They made
character generators and bitmapped displays as well. They could be
ganged to make grayscale, or even palettized color, and they made it
easy to sync them so you could overlay graphics and text. I have a
couple of each, although I haven't set them up yet. They date from
about 1978 or so. Their speed was amazingly slow. Even though the
Apple II managed to fit in a CPU access and a graphics access in each
memory cycle, the Matrox card allows the CPU twiddle a single pixel per
50 uS scanline (during hblank), so about 20K pixels/second. In other
words, a 4 MHz Z80 could execute about 25-50 instructions for each pixel
it output.
(Richard, I know you know the following, but since a short thread a
month or two ago indicates that some people are unaware how far computer
graphics hardware has come since 1978, I thought I'd go on a bit)
Now 30 years later, graphics cards have 512 MB of RAM (and more), sport
virtual memory (the graphics processor can take page faults in the
latest generation of chips), process dozens of pixels per clock at 600
MHz and use single precision FP representation per color channel, allow
general shader programs per vertex and per pixel (including
conditionals, loops, subroutines, computing transcendentals in a single
clock, 3d textures with advanced filtering, etc). Oh, and costs less
than that 1978 Matrox card even ignoring inflation. This perf/$ curve
greatly exceeds even that of the microprocessor over the same time span.
Matrox is still around and still selling graphics cards for PCs,
although they command a vanishingly small segment of the market these days.
There were other graphics cards on S-100 too. I've seen (recently) an
S-100 card that had one of the TI bitmap & sprite generator ICs on it.
4:32 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
On 3 Dec 2007 at 18:05, Jim Battle wrote:
Matrox S-100 graphics cards appear once in a while on
ebay. They made
character generators and bitmapped displays as well. They could be
ganged to make grayscale, or even palettized color, and they made it
easy to sync them so you could overlay graphics and text.
...and there were others besides the usual gang of Polymorphic,
Cromemco, Vector and North Star. Not rare, just uncommon.
I remember one very nice one (or set)--the MicroAngelo from Scion.
Initially a monochrome version with its own Z80, I think later
editions included multiple planes for color. Very nice and very
expensive.
One of the problems was the terminal-centric view--i.e. many S100
boxes simply communicated with a terminal over a serial link--far too
slow for decent graphics, although there were color graphics
terminals. And CP/M knew nothing of graphics; there was no
"standard" graphics interface as there was on, say the Apple II or
the PC, so applications software was a problem.
What is hard to appreciate from this time is how revolutionary any
sort of non-TTY interface software was. WordStar, for example, was a
real eye-opener--you hit ctrl-Y to delete a line and it vanished from
the display and succeeding lines scrolled up to close up the gap.
Amazing!
Real meaningful graphics applications would have to wait a bit to
become the rule, rather than the exception. Certainly, larger
memory spaces and faster CPUs didn't hurt.
Cheers,
Chuck
4:33 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
In article <475499E1.9030304 at pacbell.net>,
Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net> writes:
There were other graphics cards on S-100 too.
I've seen (recently) an
S-100 card that had one of the TI bitmap & sprite generator ICs on it.
Maybe it would be a fun "extend my S-100 machine" project to add a
simple graphics frame buffer? You could put a frame buffer on the
card, expose a window of the frame buffer via memory mapped I/O on teh
bus and a simple VGA output controller in an FPGA. I don't know what
you'd do with it after that, since it would be so non-standard that
there isn't any "off the shelf" software you could use with it, but it
might be a nice retro-fit!
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
5:14 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
On Dec 3, 2007, at 6:14 PM, Richard wrote:
One of these just sold on ebay item # 290186096576
I was looking at it because its graphics (I have no S-100 machines),
but even had I remembered to bid on it I would have been priced out
:-).
Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at all? It seems not.
Sadly not. I had a nice one back when I was in high school; I wrote
software for it in Turbo Pascal and Z80 assembler. I don't recall what
make/model it was, and I don't know what happened to it...I still have
the IMSAI 8080 that it was installed in, but no graphics board. :-(
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
7:01 p.m.
New subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (Merlin ?)
Anybody have one of these - they were cool, monochrome but hi res (320x240, but I'm
gessing, I forgot)
A couple of neat features:
Parallel keyboard interface
Cassette interface
ROM monitor, cassette BASIC including graphics commands, line arc rectangle AND sprites!
I built a couple of these from their kit, about $200 or so.
On the subject of BASIC with added commands I think all of us early OEMs of 8080 and z-80
machines used the same technique. We dissasebled Microsoft's code, and found where
the syntax error trap was. We then jumped to our code, and parsed our new added commands.
Our product was an industrial PC based on the Intecolor. We added serial protocol and
rs232 comm commands for PLC's linked to realtime graphics for factory automation. 20
years before Wonderware, Intelution, and Allen Bradley...
aaa the days
Randy
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
From: legalize at xmission.com
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 16:14:57 -0700
CC:
Subject: Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)
One of these just sold on ebay item # 290186096576
I was looking at it because its graphics (I have no S-100 machines),
but even had I remembered to bid on it I would have been priced out
:-).
Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at all? It seems not.
--
"The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download
<http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html>
Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>
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