Re: Franklin Ace 2000

["**** ****" <***@***.com>]

Roy and/or Janet Miller wrote in message <3A8E06A9.ADE41D05@inetnebr.com>...
>What about a 14, or 20 mhz //e? Or a machine that has, say, four different
>concurrent sessions running? That could be done with a fast 65816, and task
>switching between different portions of it's 16 megabyte memory space.
>
>Further, at one time there was a version of LOGO for the //e that had a
special
>video card, which card had the TMS 9918 video chip, so that the //e had 16
>colors, with 32 hardware generated sprites, all on a high rez screen of
about
>256x192. So? So then, it was/is possible to give the //e a different/better
>video display (the TI video chip had it's own 16K of video RAM, which was
>outside the memory space of the CPU, so you could free up CPU memory -
anything
>like that available today?


Roy, I couldn't agree more with you. There is truth in that a '816 still has
alot of life left in it. And the 16 megs of ram will leave more than just a
bit of growing room. Maybe someday I'll get around to it.

As far as video, let me just say that if I can ever find time to finish my
current project, I already have a few followup ideas for the apple2. Is
there any reason that a smart SVGA card couldn't be done for the IIe? If the
card was clever enough, there is no reason it couldn't pull all the video
info out of the II, in whatever video mode, and convert it to plain raster.
Heck, we could even throw in font switching, in the text modes! I'm just not
good enough to know exactly how yet, but I'm trying my damndest. The trick
would be to emulate the native video modes, while still allowing a
SVGA-aware prodos app access to higher resolutions. Ram is so dirt cheap
anymore, that putting 2 megs of dram on the card wouldn't be an issue. 1024
x 768 at true color anyone?

Thanks,
John