Re: Second Sight Card

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

In article Paul Schultz <pschultz@med.wayne.edu> writes...

>On 24 Feb 1998, Mitchell Spector wrote:
>>     If your using an SVGA monitor, there will be no scanlines BUT
>> you will get chunky square pixels over the GS's small round ones.
>> Also, dithering will become noticable, no longer will colors in
>> the 640 mode appear solid (e.g. the Finder backround will appear
>> as vertical blue and white stripes, not periwinkle blue). Oh, and
>> if you try and run games or anything with lots of animation, many
>> frames will skip or things will be choppy.
>
>For the most part, the chunky pixels are really never noticed. I think
>the only game I recall seeing them in was Boggled GS. The large font
>used is drawn with a more jagged edge to it.

    Well it's going to do scanline doubling, which is a trade off
essentially--you elimate the thin blacklines running through graphic
but in return pixels appear square instead of round. Some people say
they prefer this as you get solid color and a clearer picture, but
my perference is the finer detail you get _with_ scanlines.

    For years I always argued despite GS games having less colors per
screen, they looked better than their IBM counter parts done in MCGA.
Of course the irony is now the Second Sight gives Super-Hi-Res that
MCGA look and the IBM has the old GS look since non-scanline doubling
mode are used, like 640x480 or higher.

>The dithering is no more noticeable than with the original GS modes.
>In fact, the periwinkle blue looks excellent.

    That has nothing to do with the Second Sight, it depends on the
display your using. The larger the screen and the higher the dot
pitch, the less effective the dithering will become. On my old 14"
SVGA display, XGS, for example, looked fairly close to a real GS
running under the Finder. However, on my new 17" display with a
0.26mm dotpitch, I see white and blue vertical lines in the Finder.

>The animation keeps up extrememly well with Wolf 3D with no loss of
>frames or 'choppy' behavior. I really think the SS works better
>than you were made to believe. Sure, it isn't a speed demon but it
>handles the GS emulation (other than DHR!) pretty well.

    I heard in some games (like Taito's Rastan) you just get an all
black screen, or at the very least is very choppy. Was that fixed
in the 1.4BEEF ROM?

>>     Yep, it replaces the Apple 40/80 columns text font with the PC
>> ANSI font used by the Oak chip. This also means mousetext will be
>> replaced by the closest ANSI equivalents (and there are very few
>> that match). Generally this is _much_ more readable than the Apple
>> font--considering it's larger, better definded, bolder and lacks
>> scanlines running horizontally through it. On most monitors, it
>> should also refresh at 70 Hz if they're capable (meaning you get
>> less flicker and reduced eye strain).
>
>Actually, the SS does display all the MouseText characters
>correctly with the PC style text font. Jawaid coded the special
>MouseText characters in himself. Also, the text font can be
>changed. There was a program written to do this. I can't remember
>its name at the moment.

    Thanks for correcting me, I wasn't aware that was done.

>Actually, I think I've pointed out above that the SS does a very
>nice job emulating the GS video modes (except for DHR which just
>plain doesn't work with the latest ROM).

    It cannot emulate 3200 color mode either. That's not widely used
like 256 color mode, but still it leaves another gap in emulations
nonetheless.

>Overall, the SS does a very nice job emulating the GS video
>modes. In fact, if it handled DHR correctly it would be
>perfect in the emulation department. Where it has a weakness
>is the OAK chips ability to perform animation on the IIgs
>in the higher resolution VGA modes. I must admit, another
>limitation may well be the menu redraws in IIgs desktop
>programs on an unacellerated GS. This may indeed be the
>'noticeable redraws' that you have heard about. But, no
>problem here.

    I would have to highly disagree with you about the emulation
being close to perfection, it's a far cry from it--it is much too
slow shadowing graphics and cannot faithfully emulate everything.
It would have been better off if it were designed as a scanline
doubler as someone here suggested; the card has been virtually
untapped as far using its higher resolution and color depth.

    All I would credit it for is its function of letting IIgs
users connect up modern SVGA displays and the bolder ANSI text
font if your still a diehard user of AppleWorks or ProTERM.
Sometimes I think really mediocre things get highly praised in
the II world simply because we're "starving" for new things.
In the Amiga world, where they have different high quality
video cards to choose from, the Second Sight would be utterely
laughed at. I'm not saying we should be critical of everything
released, but when something is blantently bad we shouldn't
pretend it's not.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca