Re: Help ID Card: Giantek Chinese ROM Card?

[BAD <badavis@nbnet.nb.ca>]

Thanks for your thoughts.

I am going to try the cards in an Apple II+ over the weekend. If it
doesn't blow up, I'll let you know the results.

Brian




On Thu, 31 Jan 2002 14:18:23 +0100, Linards Ticmanis
<ticmanis@coli.uni-sb.de> wrote:

Brian A. Davis wrote:

> An Internet search reveled that Giantek Technology Corp. is now a large 
> manufacturer of LED display boards. Further searching revealed that in 
> 1983 Giantek developed the first "Chinese Generation Interface Card" for 
> the Apple II. That might mean these cards are a Chinese screen character 
> generator.

I don't know this beast, however lots of ROM surely sounds like a 
Chinese character generator for sure. Maybe the Z80 is used to run an 
oncard Input Method Editor, allowing you to type chinese from a
standard 
keyboard. The IME card would need lots of ROM too that contains the 
possible spellings for a given sequence of phonetic input. Also IME 
running in the Apple II main RAM would waste too much RAM by far.

Just my �2.