Re: Any planned comm software for SS/TR?

[spector@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article dempson@atlantis.actrix.gen.nz (David Empson) writes...
>
>In article <3h2fk4$hdv@paris.ics.uci.edu>, Orion Pax <jlee@ics.uci.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> It's not text screen. It's SHR, that's why :).  Although I do think
>> ANSITerm could be lots faster if it was in 320 mode and a custom font.
> 
>To get 80-column text in 320 mode, you have 4 pixels per character
>(including the gap between the characters).  Have you ever tried to
>draw text with less than five?  It looks awful.
> 
>I doubt it would be any faster - the same amount of memory is used in
>320 mode and 640 mode, so scrolling would be identical.  The only
>benefit would be more colours.

	Using an Apple IIgs system as-is, it's near impossible to get 
a "decent" color ANSI text display. Use the SHR 320 mode and get nice
looking color but unreadable fonts and character symbols. Use SHR 640
mode and get horrible dithered color and a font that sometimes is 
readable, and other times (depending on dithered color used) not. 
I suppose a possible solution might be some extensive hardware 
programming tricks. Use the 640 mode with 16 _pure_ colors and
multiple color palettes. Although the placement of these 16 pure
colors _per scanline_ in the 640 mode is limited, it might look better
than what is displayed using dithering of 4-6 colors. Another idea is 
using the color foreground and background text in IIe emulation mode and 
overlaying it onto a Super-Hi-Res graphic screen. Of course you'd
have to use interrupts every few scanlines and this would only give
you more colors vertically. All in all, this would get *very* messy
doing all these hardware hacks at once! :)

	Of course the best solution of all is can be summed up
in two simple words:  Second Sight. :) Let's just hope someone out
there plans to utilitize it's built-in character generator for 
terminal software.

>David Empson
>dempson@actrix.gen.nz
>Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand

Mitchell Spector
m_spect@pavo.concordia.ca / spector@vax2.concordia.ca