Re: Apple ][gs VGA Card

[nathan@cco.caltech.edu (Nathan Mates)]

In article <36c019$23h@nuscc.nus.sg>,
Lim Thye Chean <ltchean@iss.nus.sg> wrote:
>But SecondSight is different. First, it works on //e, this alone will open a 
>new market since there must be a lot of AppleWorks diehearts out there and
>they might be interested in product like this.

   Appleworks if probably very hardcoded to use the 80-col text
screen.  In its over 10 years of service, that's never had to
change. Programmers are usually very lazy, so small, fast, hardcoded
solutions are the norm. Adding support for randomly-sized text
desktops would be a huge amount of support (how would you implement
the 'filecard' interface in 134*52 for example without it looking very
scrunched up) for a limited market.

   With this board, it's been said that the text-screen will look better
due to its scanline doubling. Fine, but would you pay $180 for smoother
characters?

   I think that the majority of the sales will be to GS owners; with
the right patches, QDII could be patched to provide fairly
application-transparent improvements. Even if it's nothing more than
letting you put a 320 (or 640) *200 256-color pic in the background
and standard ("16" colors) windows/menus, that would really be worth
it. //e programs have had a single, well-known system and capabilities 
for 10 years now; killing bad habits of programs (especially when 90%
of them are no longer supported) probably won't happen at all.

Nathan Mates


-- 
* Nathan Mates   http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~nathan/               *
* Ftp humor archiver: ftp to cco.caltech.edu, look in pub/humor     *
* "Always listen to experts. They'll tell what can't be done, and   *
*  why. Then do it."  -- Robert A. Heinlein, Lazarus Long           *