Re: I Got a VOC Coming!

[Mitchell Spector <mitch2gs@hotmail.com>]

Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sympatico.ca> wrote:

>I have found that not only is the composite video out
>from the VOC a better signal

    Definitely preferable (and nicer!) but because it's doing hardware
anti-aliasing, the trade off is the image will look somewhat blurry and
colors slightly less saturated on a composite TV/monitor.

>but the RGB out to my Commodore 1084S monitor seems to a 
>little nicer too.

    I found connecting the VOC up to the AppleColor RGB gave a 
lesser quality image. I can see a very faint vertical banding, the
video brightness is higher than normal, and I remember (though I'd
have to double-check) it made whites look less pure, almost a bit
yellowed.

    The VOC doesn't seem to get along with my NEC MultiSync 3D
monitor (which supports both VGA and NTSC frequencies). Works
fine off the built-in IIgs RGB port but it would keep randomly getting 
thrown out of frequency sync when connected to the VOC.

>I haven't looked into it too far yet but I did come up with an idea
>years ago to be able to display 640x200 images with 16 colours per
>pixel per scan line (not dithered) and 320x200 images with 256 colours
>per pixel per scan line.  Doing this involves hooking the composite
>out of the motherboard to the composite in of the VOC and overlaying
>the VOC image on the motherboard image using 50% transparency.
>However, as the two images don't exactly overlap it would require
>tweaking something on the VOC to get the image "in focus".

    That would be _very_ neat, but I'd be hesitant to break the wax seals 
on those factory-set pots and play around with them. :)

>Another thing you can use a VOC for is to add Super Hi-Res display
>capabilities to the Apple IIe.  I don't know if you can get coloured
>text on the IIe but you can definitely view SHR images.

    Has anyone ever written a program to support this on a IIe? I know 
the ability is there but I can't think of any particular program (or demo) 
that's done it.

Mitchell Spector