When designing training screens with the original version of Summit,
we could work in 3 modes:
1. Text, using 16 colours and the ASCII character
set plus an extended (?) character set of special
characters to a total of 256 characters.
2. High-resolution graphics, using *2* colours only
(black and one other colour of choice) and pixel-graphics.
3. Low-resolution graphics, using *4* colours only
(black and EITHER red/green/yellow OR pink/blue/white)
and pixel-graphics.
Recently, they came out with a new version that's supposed to
enable users to get all 16 colours in both graphics modes as well
as in text mode - provided the machine being used is equipped with
an EGA card. We have the new software, but we haven't yet been able
to make use of the new capabilities because we don't have EGA cards.
There may be a way, but we haven't figured it out yet.
What we'd like to do is figure out how to tap into the 16 colours
with the equipment we have *without* having to invest in the EGA cards.
I realize that may be a pipe dream, but, heck.
I seem to remember from 'way back that the 6300 as it comes off
the shelf is already equipped with a fancy graphics capabilities,
that it's supposed to be the equivalent of a PC or XT with some
graphics card. What card is that? Is it an EGA card? Anyone know?
If the 6300 is the equivalent of a PC/XT with an EGA card, does
anyone have any idea what kinds of things might be involved in
modifying the CBT package to make it work with our equipment?
OR what's involved in getting our EGA-equivalent to act like an EGA?
Is it possible? Probable? If the 6300 card is not an EGA equivalent,
what *is* it?
Thanks.
Kathy Vincent ------> {ihnp4|mtune|codas|ptsfa}!bakerst!kathy
------> {ihnp4|mtune|burl|codas}!wrcola!kathy
------> { favourite AT&T gateway }!wruxe!unix
Hope this helps...
__ _ _ _____ Bill Fenner wcf @ psuhcx.bitnet
/ ) // // / ' wcf @ hcx.psu.edu
/--< o // // ,-/-, _ __ __ _ __ ihnp4!psuvax1!psuhcx.bitnet!wcf
/___/_<_</_</_ (_/ </_/ <_/ <_</_/ (_
The graphics cards that come in the 6300 are not EGA compatible. They
actually have a better resolution then EGA provides (600x400 or 80x50
text), but they are only monochrome. AT&T also makes a card that
allows the mode to be 16 colors (DEB), but it costs over $800 but
there you use your old color monitor.
AT&T is now offering a new graphics card for their computers that
sits in a slot and does CGA, 600x400 mono, 600x400 16 color (DEB?),
and EGA. The card requires that the original graphics adapter be
disabled. The cost of the card is $500 dollars. The reason for it
costing less probably reflects the difference in chip technology since
the DEB was introduced several years ago.
I have not seen this new graphics card, but I am supposed to be
getting the first one in Rochester for a loan. A local computer store
is going to let me play with the card for a while and then give them
an evaluation of the card. The card started shipping the end of
December, so I should be seeing it soon.
I will post my initial reactions as soon as the card arrives.
--
The Wumpus UUCP: {cmcl2!decvax}!rochester!ur-tut!aptr
BITNET: aptrccss@uorvm
Internet: ap...@tut.cc.rochester.edu
Disclaimer: "Who? When? Me? It was the Booze!" - M. Binkley
Well anyway, the design of the machine is pretty much the same as
the 6300 / 6310 with the motherboard on the bottom and the slots up
top.
The video board was set up to the same video modes as the indboard
on a 6300, but is was in a regular slot. The chipset was by
Vector, or something like that. It looked like a pretty early
hardware rev, as there was a truck load of pasted on jumper wires
on the video board. It looked like the video board was
manufactured by OPE, as it bore the usual appearance of their work.
The rest of the Workstation's harware was pretty clean. Mounting
the hard drive in the attached sidecar was a good idea.
Eventhogh the video board appeared to be very much a patched-up
affair, it did seem to work OK.
The only real criticism I have of the Workstation is that the
keyboard has a pretty cheesey tactile feel like a low-budget Taiwan
clone. The stupid coiled cord is too short, exits from the left of
the keyboard and has to plug into the right of the machine. Dumb.
Come to think of it the 6300's keyboard cable is a similar design,
but it isn't as short as the cable on the Workstation's keyboard.
The keyboard on the 6300s was really pretty good. It wasn't like a
bunch of miniature pogo sticks like an IBM, and it wans't mushy like
clone keyboards. Of course, some people didn't like the key layout
but that is more of an issue for endless debate.
Will they run in older 6300's as add ons ?
The older 6300 machines had adhered to the IBM CGA standard. This means :
640 x 200 monochrome
320 x 200 4 colors
64 shades of grey if you have a monochrome monitor and run in color mode.
and that's it if I remember right. THere might have been some Hercules
monochrome support but I doubt it. Lotus 1-2-3 2.01 does come with an
80 x 50 screen driver for 6300's, but it works ONLY on 6300's so it's
not CGA or Hercules.
What I recommend to people here that want to do good color stuff on
6300's is :
*DON'T* buy an AT&T color monitor, they are way over priced
Get an EGA card. They range in price from around $100 up to $600
for ones that will do the new IBM VGA standard as well as EGA. Run
down to your local Radio Shack (or any local dealer) and pick up an
RGB monitor. In general, the cost of these two items is within $50
of an AT&T color monitor alone (that's with a Radio Shack monitor
and a Taxan autoswitch EGA card). This combination allows :
640 x 200 64 color
640 x 200 16 color
CGA support
Hercules monochrome support
Installation involves changing a dip switch and moving 1 jumper.
Recently I priced out an NEC multi-sync and the Taxan card for someone
at around $750. That's less than the cost of the Display Enhancement
Board alone.
Unfortunately, if you've already sunk $500 or more dollars into an
AT&T color monitor, your only alternative is the DEB.
Frank McGee
So, can any one help me out. I would happy if I got the 251 to be as
fast as the 225, although happier if it were faster. Does anyone
know the optimal interleave for the 251 with the WD WX1 and an XT.
Alternatively is there a better half height drive for the money
about $500-600).
Thanks in advance
Neal Beck
Dept. of Pol. Sci
beck@ucsd (Bitnet)
be...@sdcsvax.ucsd.edu (Arpa)
> called that an associate has on loan from AT&T. Pretty decent Unix
> port. Works well doing XT Layers on a 630 terminal.
>
> Well anyway, the design of the machine is pretty much the same as
> the 6300 / 6310 with the motherboard on the bottom and the slots up
> top.
>
> The video board was set up to the same video modes as the indboard
> on a 6300, but is was in a regular slot. The chipset was by
> Vector, or something like that. It looked like a pretty early
> hardware rev, as there was a truck load of pasted on jumper wires
> on the video board. It looked like the video board was
> manufactured by OPE, as it bore the usual appearance of their work.
AT&T has two new video boards: the VDC400 which is functionally
identicle to the built in video board of all the previous
machines, and the VDC750. The VDC750 has all the modes of the
VDC400 plus EGA. The VDC400 is the standard equipment on the
new PCs and is compatible with the 318H monitor. The VDC750
requires the 319 monitor, which is new. I believe it is a
multifrequency type to allow it to handle the 400 line AT&T
mode or the 350 line EGA mode. I believe both boards are made
by Paradise.
The DEB standard is not offered on the new boards but AT&T
still supports it. The DEB itself is no longer made (*I
believe*). It seems funny that AT&T is just now offering EGA,
(and a new monitor for it) when everybody else is jumping on
VGA. VGA may be in the near future, especially if Paradise
is making cards for AT&T. Having seen EGA and the 400 line
mode side by side, EGA is a step down. VGA looks great though.
Russ Sharples
homxc!rps
NOTE:
The above in NO WAY reflects the opinions of AT&T.
These opinions are my own and the results of un-scientific and
highly irregular analysis methods.
My apologies if I got the name of the machine wrong. It is
whatever the most recent AT&T 80386-based computer is called.
I belive the AT&T '386 product has been written about in such
places as Infoworld.
As far as the Unix on the machine goes: I don't know if it still
considered a beta release -- possibly. I have read some articles
in the computer trade rags that AT&T had contracted out to one of
any number of houses [which house depends on which rag you read] to
perform the porting of Unix to the 80386. I guess that I mean "Unix
Port" in the sense that somebody or more likely bodies had to do the
work of getting Ssys V running on the '386 taking full advantage of
the '386s features, rather than just pretending the '386 is a '286.
The [MS] DOS-merge facility was not available at the time I looked
the machine over. We couldn't do to much with the 630 termianl, as
a dmdcc compiler was unavailable. The 630 did run multiple
sessions quite effectively, though.
>
> What I recommend to people here that want to do good color stuff on
> 6300's is :
>
> *DON'T* buy an AT&T color monitor, they are way over priced
>
> Get an EGA card. They range in price from around $100 up to $600
...
>
> 640 x 200 64 color
> 640 x 200 16 color
> CGA support
> Hercules monochrome support
>
> Installation involves changing a dip switch and moving 1 jumper.
It's more complex on older PC6300s. You should also
(hopefully) get the EGA mode of 640x350 16 colors.
>
> Unfortunately, if you've already sunk $500 or more dollars into an
> AT&T color monitor, your only alternative is the DEB.
No, there is also the STB EGA Multires II as well as some
other possibilities (I think that Magnavox, and TAXAN may
make EGA cards that have 400 line, 25Khz output but I am
not sure.
>
> Frank McGee
Not True, you can get an EGA card from STB systems that produces
text, CGA, EGA on an AT&T color monitor.
--
J.R. Miller, AT&T Bell Labs, Columbus, OH
CB 1C-339 (614) 860-4314
ihnp4!cblpe!jrm
Microsoft Windows in 16color mode and Rix Softworks EGA Paint 2005
are examples of programs that fail. Both cause total failure
requiring a cold boot to recover. Interestingly, Windows does work
in monochrome EGA mode (which isn't as good as the 6300 indboard).
The failures of certain programs on EGA in the PC6300 are likely
due to sloppy programming practices using 16 bit OUT instructions
to directly access registers on the EGA card. On the PC6300 there
is an unfortunate "bug" that sends the two bytes of a 16 bit OUT
to the buss connectors in the opposite order of that chosen for the
IBM PC/AT. The "bug" is not really an error since the AT&T PC6300
actually antedates the PC/AT. At the time the PC6300 hit the
streets, there was no defacto IBM standard for doing 16 bit I/O.
The ROM BIOS 1.43 release included a new PAL-90 decoder chip that was
supposed to "cure" the reversed order of the bytes. Unfortunately
the problem was not really cured by the new PAL. Oh well.
So... The STB mulitres is indeed electrically compatible with the
400 line, 25KHz scan rate of the AT&T color monitor, but it still
doesn't always work.
--Bill
i'm not certain about this;
can somebody who knows verify this for me?
George S. Kong, Silicon Graphics, Inc., (415)962-3281
g...@sgi.com
...{decwrl,allegra,sun,adobe,ucbvax,pyramid,ames}!sgi!gsk
The new card is essentially a multifrequency graphics card
that supports CGA, EGA and AT&T's 640 x 400 modes. Installing
it in a 6300 is just as problematic as installing any other
EGA card - you still have the 16bit word order problem (when
transmitting a 16 graphics instruction to the card on the 8
bit bus, it must be sent as two 8 bit words. Problem is
which to send first? We send the 8 high bits then the 8
low bits, IBM sends the the low bits then the high bits. For
some reason, fixing this on the 6300 was "not possible".
The 6300 Plus uses the same word order as the IBM standard.)
I have been told by someone at (the old) IS that "The VDC750
will not work in the PC6300 reliably. This is not a problem
with the VDC750 but with the BUS on the PC6300. It would
take a major redesign of the PC6300 to support an EGA type board"
What "reliably" means it the usual problems: EGA works on some
software but not others (Microsoft products are particularly
troublesome).
>
> >Unfortunately, if you've already sunk $500 or more dollars into an
> >AT&T color monitor, your only alternative is the DEB.
>
> The new card allow the use of the old monitor you have for EGA. The
> sweep frequency of the monitor is fast enough to handle EGA with no
> problem because it can already handle DEB.
I don't think this is true. I was told you need the 319 monitor
for EGA with the VDC750. The 318 monitor is a fixed frequency
(25Khz) 400 line monitor. You need a lower frequency (21.8Khz)
to display EGA. The 319 can drop to this lower frequency,
the 318 can't. Essentially, the 319 is a multisynch. While I
have not seen this carved in stone anywhere, I have surmised it
from what several people have told me. (If I'm wrong, I imagine
someone in the know will tell me.)
On the IBM, byte order is determined by the INTEL 8088 which does
the muxing for you. It writes all 16-bit words (1 byte at a time)
in double write cycles because of the 8-bit bus. The 6300, of
course, uses a 8086 which can take advantage of its 16-bit bus when
writing a word to an even address--it uses one write cycle. Now,
in this case we've got to get our 16-bit word onto the bus
converter's 8-bit bus so we can be compatible with the wealth of
IBM XT standard expansion boards. The problem, which byte to send
first, is answered by *looking* at the 8088 bus timing. Strangely
enough, the pc6300 bus converter does it in descending address
order. First the high byte goes to the word address + 1, then the
low byte follows to the word address. I believe the design is
Olivetti's as is the decision to fix or not to fix.
The reason EGA loves this is because of its 'hybrid' register
design. EGA has pairs of 'ports' (select, value) which allows the
software to write to a number of EGA registers through the same
port pair. First, write a number to 'select' to select the desired
register, then write the desired number to 'value'.
Software wizards (I guess there are a lot of them at Microsoft)
noticed that a few ASM instruction could be saved by loading AL
with 'select' and AH with 'value' and using a 16-bit OUT
instruction. Of course they are assuming, and rightly so, that the
low byte is sent during the first cycle (as 8088).
Since the EGA port pairs start at even addresses, when the 16-bit
OUT instruction is executed on the 6300, the bus converter sends
the 'value' byte during the first cycle and the 'select' byte
follows. Guess what, it doesn't work.
For now software with this problem can be patched by replacing OUTW
with INT 3 and writing an interrupt handler to output the bytes in
the correct order.
If all software developers would stop using OUTW in EGA S/W then
life would be bliss.
j baker
All technical corrections are appreciated.
There is a driver for Microsoft Windows that fixes this problem.
The driver was written by someone at AT&T.
It is available through the hotline I think.
At least it is available through the BBS that the HOTLINE supports.
HOTLINE 1-800-922-0354
HOTLINE BBS 769-5616
Hope this helps.
Ralph Heredia
Wrong. You can use the 318 with the VDC750 however the following are
the limitations if you do so.
1. you can only see 16 color out of a palette of 16 in this configuration.
2. Your EGA applications will look shrunk on the display.
(the 319H expands ega apps to 400 line and gives you 16 colors out of
a palette of 64.
> for EGA with the VDC750. The 318 monitor is a fixed frequency
> (25Khz) 400 line monitor. You need a lower frequency (21.8Khz)
> to display EGA. The 319 can drop to this lower frequency,
The VDC750 brings EGA to 25KHz.
> the 318 can't. Essentially, the 319 is a multisynch. While I
Multisynch is to strong of a word considering the flexible scan rates
that true multisynchs work at.
We like to call it multimode.
> have not seen this carved in stone anywhere, I have surmised it
> from what several people have told me. (If I'm wrong, I imagine
> someone in the know will tell me.)
I'm telling you.
>
>
>Russ Sharples
>homxc!rps
My opinions come from experience with these cards.
Ralph Heredia
mtunf!ralph
What's the area code of the Hotline BBS? Could it be an 800 call also?
-Richard
--
Richard B Dervan - Office of Computing Services | Go you fuzzy |
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332 | Bees |
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