Re: What is Second Sight? Please inform.

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

In article blake@widomaker.com (Blake Patterson) writes...
>
>	Could someone give me a detailed description of what a Second
>Sight board is?

	It is a video enhancement board for the Apple IIe and IIgs.
It is the same concept as plug-in SVGA boards used in the IBM PC world,
in fact it uses a VGA chipset (Oak 087 and RAMDAC) found on certain PC
video cards. In essence Sequential Systems, the company that designed
and produced it, "borrowed" parts from a PC SVGA board and placed it on 
a standard Apple II slot card. 

	Although technically it works on an 8-bit Apple IIe, it is
mainly intended to be an Apple IIgs add-on. It plugs into any available 
slot (only slot #3 on ROM 01) and adds port connectors for either the
standard AppleColor RGB or any PC VGA/SVGA display. It is of limited use
on a regular IIgs display (640x400 interlaced) so most choose to use more
modern 14' to 17' non-interlaced PC monitors. And since it uses a VGA chip,
available is 24-bit color (16.8 million colors), color PC-ANSI text modes
and up to 1024x768 pixel resolutions. The firmware on-board can grab most
standard Apple II video modes and shadow them to whatever display it's
connected to (more on that below).

Technical info: - Oak-087 VGA processor
		- bt478 (256 colors) or bt481 (16.8M colors) RAMDAC
                - Zilog Z180 processor rated at 20 MHz
		- 512K or 1MB of (ZIP) RAM memory
                - On-board ROM firmware
                - Pins for cable with DB connector (video-out)

Personal opinions? It's now been about 1 full year since the board hit
the market and began to ship. At that time the firmware was still more 
or less alpha (uncompleted, buggy) and no software to take advantage of
the board, expect a simple graphic viewer (GIF/TIFF/BMP/etc) included
with the board. So...a year has passed and what happened? Virtually nothing!
The firmware still remains uncompleted, making it unusable on IIe as it 
cannot shadow Double-Hi-Res, nor can it accurately minic Hi-Res. As well, 
it doesn't properly emulate Apple IIgs Super-Hi-Res modes. No Fillmode, no 
scanline interrupts (256/3200c), cannot keep up with a fast FPS rate (most 
games, demos) and is buggy in shadowing even static displays. From what I 
can tell, even the hardware sounds somewhat unstable and causes crashes.

Furthermore, what native-SS software exists? A small handful of foreign
graphics viewers and basic "GIF viewing" support from within Sequential's
DiscQuest CD-ROM software. A patched QuickDraw II and certain other
minor updates to existing programs are in-progress, but all the bugs
in the card's firmware have delayed things to the point they may not
even be released. Another complaint, the board is quite expensive at
US$200 and there have been very few discounts made available. And if
this weren't enough, the board is rather limited in terms of speed and
moving graphics around, despite the Zilog co-processor (this on TOP of 
the IIgs's 1 MHz, 8-bit bus, which boards like the defunct TurboRez at 
least made a significant effort to overcome).

Bottom line: At present the Second Sight is little more than a
glorified adpater interface. It lets you connect modern displays to 
your Apple IIgs (yes there's the bonus of easier to read PC text and
ability for a glance at GIF/JPEG in TrueColor, but is this worth
the price? Do these two small advantages outweigh the disadvantages?)
Unless things drastically change over the next several months,
fixing up the board's "rough" spots and presence of native software 
support, it will go down in history as yet another 'SuperSprite 16'!
There is still time for a turn-around, but my hope is starting to fade.
I must say I'm sorry to sound so negative and critical of the board, but
I have to say after watching things from the sidelines, I'm rather 
disappointed of what could have been...


Mitchell Spector
spector@vax2.concordia.ca