Re: What is this card?

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

"william strutts" <wrstrutts1@home.com> wrote:

>What is an AST Vision card and what does it do?

    It was a real-time video frame grabber. You plugged in any NTSC
(composite) video source and you could digitally capture an image
and save it either as raw data or Super-Hi-Res. In the case of the
latter it was 4-bit greyscale or color for the 320 mode, though raw 
data images held more color data if you wanted to export it. The
card also went by the name "Visionary GS" and "Vision Plus 
Enhanced" as it changed company hands.

    What was neat (for it's time) was as a real-time capture card, you
could watch the live frames update and appear on your RGB monitor.
Rather like a poor-man's Video Overlay Card for TV-input (poor in the
sense it was greyscales, in a tiny window and skipped a bit I heard).
The ComputerEyes GS by contrast took 6 to 12 seconds just to
process a single scanned frame! It did have the potential ability to
work as a video capture card (capture streaming video and play it
back) but the software was never written. Ron Mercer's Mini-Movies
and DreamWorld's DreamVision Demo are (I think) prototypes of that
software that never was.

>I am also curious what a CMS SCSI card was for.  On my mac,
>I used to have a CMS hard drive for the Mac Plus.
>Is the CMS SCSI card any good?  I have seen a couple
>of systems with a CMS card in them on ebay.  

    It's one of the obscure SCSI cards made for the Apple II. They're
not recommended for several reasons, some of which include no DMA
support making it rather slow, a proprietary partitioning scheme that
won't allow you to read a hardrive with anything _but_ another CMS
card, having to set partitions sizes with jumpers on the card, and
finally, being limited to only 2 partitions (possibly 4 with the newer
firmware?) for 64 MB of maximum storage.

>Are they worth getting or is the only good card the Apple
>SCSI card that you guys keep talking about?

    Not really. You should stick with the three main SCSI controllers:
Original Apple SCSI (aka "Revision C"), Apple High-Speed SCSI, 
or the RamFAST SCSI. Having used all three, I *heavily* prefer the
RamFAST SCSI controller.

>Does this card support CD-ROM's or only hard drives?

    No. Only hardrives and generally around 60 MB or smaller (using a
larger drive is certainly doable, but you won't be able to partition
most of it which is kind of wasteful).

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca