Re: Apple IIGS monitor replacement

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

 heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:

>On Apr 29, 2:00 am, Michael Black <et...@ncf.ca> wrote:
>
>> ANd of course, the problem isn't that the IIGS didn't output VGA, it's
>> that the design is over twenty years old now, so what was easy to
>> get back then may no longer be the case.  But history doesn't intend
>> to be historical, so it didn't matter at the time what was used in
>> the IIGS.

    Interestingly enough, the Macintosh II was introduced 6 months 
after the Apple IIgs and supported a VGA-type mode with it's NuBus 
card (640x480 with 256 colors out of 16.7 million). The IIgs doesn't 
pre-date VGA graphics by _that_ much.

>I remember reading that Apple didn't want to use 400-line
>monitors for the GS for several reasons (upgrade path for
>Apple II users, higher resolutions being reserved for the Mac).

    What I recall was the cost of non-interlaced monitors being very
costly back then, so Apple reasoned it made no sense supporting
more than 640x200 in the GS's hardware. Ironically, the AppleColor 
RGB was *still* very expensive, and, does support 640x400 interlace. 
As a matter of fact if you have a Video Overlay Card (which duplicates 
the same VGC video chipset from the IIgs) you can display 640x400 
on the AppleColor RGB as-is. Made me wonder why Apple couldn't 
at least update the GS to display interlace video if its companion
display supported it. If the VOC did it, how difficult would it be for
the ROM 3?

    It would've been doable to produce an updated VGC that could
support 640x400 with 256 colors by 1987-88 (there were rumours
it had been done even) but if you updated the GS Finder to make
use of that mode, you'd have an exact duplicate of the Macintosh
Finder. Probably why Apple never updated the GS's video...or it's
speed for that matter.

Mitchell Spector