Re: What is this card?

["Brendon Woirhaye" <bytre@hotmail.com>]

I actually had some CMS SCSI cards I got in '86 for an 80mb drive (which was
totally massive at the time).  I had to use two of them to access the whole
drive - each card could only handle two partitions of 32mb each, as
mentioned, but you are able to use multiple cards (with different SCSI ID's)
to access additional space.

Not that I'd recommend it, but it can be done.

"Mitchell Spector" <a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca> wrote in message
3b26e8bd.16380530@newsflash.concordia.ca">news:3b26e8bd.16380530@newsflash.concordia.ca...
> "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
>
>
>