Half-half acceleration due to built in CPU and can compute arcs, lines etc for cad work I think. But I know PGA is grossly unusual design and unrealistic cost kept it it. Cost was about 5,000 I think. BTW, it is 3 boards package and monitor. Saw both monitor and card set but not in action. Cheers, Wizard

Cool!! Interesting tidbit, interestingly I own part of Curtis Priem's design hardware. (GeForce2 MX) :-) I hope Nvidia don't go way of cash-greedy so too far. :-( Seems that way. Cheers, Wizard

So I guess you might say that the GeForce GPU used in today's PCs are the ultimate evolution of the PGA design.

How advanced did the IBM designs get? are there any added capability later on? I also heard that there are 3rd party vendors which designed and sold their own PGA based solutions. Who are they? Also, how practical was a PC/AT or a PC/XT equipped to the card compared to to similar products at that timeframe in that price range? In order words, are there better items for cheaper offered on the market at that time? Hmmm...So there's no framebuffer in the card like today's SVGA cards, and so everything is done via commands through a DMA channel? What is the emulator emulating, exactly? So it's a bit like an S3 Virge 325, which is an SVGA chipset with 2D and very limited 3D support, but the S3 is VESA 1.2, while the PGA is very propietory. Of course, it WOULD be fun to stick a PGA card into an IBM PC/XT and write a version of some primitive 3D flat shaded game, say, Falcon AT, to take advantage of PGA...Of course, I predict the game would bring the PGA to its knees, since I really doubt the ability of the 8-Bit ISA slot to keep the PGA filled with data. Yeah, I would like to think of it as the grand-daddy to the nVidia GeForce series. Hmmm...Are there software written especially to take advantage of the PGA?

It does support image display to some extent. It has an image_write function (0xd9) that will write a bunch of pixels. The function (only available in binary command mode) is of the format {0xd9,y_start,x_start,x_end} followed by packets containing the pixel values. It certainly wasn't fast, but it was faster than setting each pixel individually. Wouldn't recommend trying to write a graphics intensive game for it, though. Eric

For those interested in programming information, the pc-vista package (available at http://www2.sci.muni.cz/pub/ccdsoft/ (the first place google returned)) contains some PGA image display routines. The commands were text based. To clear the screen to color 0 you'd write " CLS 0 " into the communications buffer. To draw a circle or radius 10 at (150,150 ) in color 15 using line function 1 you'd send " LF 1 C 15 M 150 150 CI 10 ". The PGA routines for PC Vista were written here at UCB. The undergraduate lab used to have an AT with a PGA. We also had a couple of PC-RT's running X10 as a windowing system as opposed to X11. And a couple XTs running some Unix version (PCIX?) I'm sure they have long since gone to the surplus store or the scrap heap. :( I need to stop the nostalgia now or I'll break into a rousing rendition of "Where have all the RTs gone?" Eric

There are pictures of one that we have on my web site, in the Technological Oddities section. Bill Richman bill_r(a)inetnebr.com http://incolor.inetnebr.com/bill_r Home of Fun with Molten Metal, technological oddities, and the original COSMAC Elf computer simulator!