Subject: killer vga

From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
Date: Tue, 17 Mar 92 19:34:09 PST

Orchid is shipping a 486/33 motherboard with their Farenheit 1280
card on the board, with a "32-bit" bus between the two.  I saw this
in an ad, so have no idea what this really means.  I don't remember
if the Farenheit has 32k colors.  640x400x32k is 512k, so that gives
reasonable resolution & coloration.  The 32-bit bus is great for
flat-filled polys, but with lit ones I think you're stuck with one
pixel paints, so we want bus speed instead of width.

Gee, it sure would be nice if you had official benchmark binaries that
we could run on different machines (yes, that again).

Lance Norskog

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From: [email-masked] (Lance Norskog)
Date: Thu, 23 Apr 92 19:42:43 PDT

You could add a joystick poller to every Nth interrupt.
Joystick cards these days have switches for fast CPU's,
and I soldered a 47kohm resistors in parallel
with my input pots to speed up the polling.  With 200-300kohms
in parallel the pots will count down in 20 or 30 loops max.  
No big deal.

The resolution drops proportionately but you can still use the
numbers anyway.

S3 cards are pretty cheap, but I don't know exactly what
stuff they support.  They're billed as "Windows Accelerators"
so they're probably just 2D line-drawer-helpers.

And, of course, a DJGPP port :-)  Wait till you start doing
stereo sound sampling, you'll overrun 640k like a
herd of caribou!

Lance Norskog