Re: Rarest Card

[A2Aviator <a2aviator@gmail.com>]

The project was actually demo'ed long before that Kansas day, it was
shown at AppleFest, before the introduction of the ROM 3.

The biggest problem back then was right about the time a design was
settled on, the chips went off production. The thing fizzled.

It was rumored that since I possessed a board, and that since I
stopped in Denver on the way to Kansas City in the months before the
Second Sight was released, that it there for must have been myself and
those in Denver that single handedly killed the whole TurboREZ project
because we "reverse engineered it" and used it for the Second Sight.

This is what they would have had you believing if you were on the IRC
channel at the time, truth of the matter was, the TurboREZ had been in
work for ages as an experiment and then perhaps a real product could
be made from it and like now, like then, lots and lots of people will
speak up, and when it comes time to fork over the loot ..  they run
and hide.

The whole entire thing was quite laughable too, the Second Sight and
TurboREZ were two completely utterly different designs, different
directions, etc. Not even the same thing in the slightest. The
TurboREZ could be looked akin to the 3Dfx and the x86 VESA video spec.
It brought effects and features to the table, so that the host
computer didn't have to do that.

The Second Sight really does none of that. It's design barely keeps up
with the host computer as it is.

Today, it's a lot easier to make a very short run of PCBs and granted
it's a lot easier to find IC's. It's also a lot easier to design with
programmable parts. AKA, the CB project.

The whole point of the Second Sight card back then ..

Was to sell more copies of DiscQuest, RAMFasts and CD ROMs. The reason
for the card was because the DiscQuest product relied on those
DiscPassage CDs that had the potential to have higher resolution and
greater depth graphics than the IIgs could ever display.

The problem was, just to outfit a IIgs with enough hardware to view
those Disc Passage titles, you had to spend more than a whole 386
computer was going for. If you bought the 386 you could get twice as
many computers in your lab and get away from the dying Apple II
platform all together, and stick it to the company that you felt was
giving you the shaft, by buying the up and coming fledgling Windows
instead. ;-) ... while you still used your Apple II investment. In
effect, you spent $1100 on a RAMFast, SecondSight, DiscQuest, CD ROM
drive and a hard drive. All for what? 15 CD ROM titles, most of which
sucked the big one.

Disc Passage was a great idea that didn't fly.  It was easier to just
code your own front end, from a publishers standpoint, than pay to
license one. The Phillips CD-I player was another shining example of
that. Flopped. Hard.

Faster than C.E.D. video discs.

The Video Overlay Card was yet another product that was lessor
understood and as vastly different from the Second Sight and TurboREZ
as those two were to each other.

Video cards and the Apple II .. perhaps it is rather interesting in
that no other peripheral has produced so many rare, and eccentric, and
vapor products. The broader scope, including frame grabbing hardware
is fairly well populated in the Apple II arena. Way more so than many
people imagine.  As well, been so hard to attain with regards to
keeping up with available monitors. Ironically, now, we have several
VGA options. VGA is about on it's way out. Only it won't be going away
anytime soon nor as fast as the IIgs monitors did when they dried up.
There's *a lot* more VGA out there.