Alternate character set + Ext 80 col/AppleColor RGB card

[Martin Doherty <martin.doherty@undisclosed.com>]

Was just stuffing about last night with the alternate character set on 
my enhanced IIe: wrote a short BASIC program to switch character set and 
then poke ASCII values into screen memory, and was rewarded with my 
first look at MouseText characters (on my Apple M100 digital RGB monitor 
which is driven by the Ext 80 col/RGB card in the AUX slot).

Then I was stuffing about with the Ext 80 col/RGB demo disk, one menu 
option displayed the primary and alternate character sets, and where the 
MouseText characters should be were inverse Uppercase.  This is the 
result you'd expect on an unenhanced IIe.

I'm not sure how to reconcile the two results.  My current theory is 
that in the first case the motherboard was generating the characters 
(although the video signal comes out of the AUX card), but in the second 
the RGB card had taken over and was using its own character generator 
chip, which seems to be equivalent to the unenhanced IIe in its lack of 
MouseText.

Pity, because I was thinking of trying out some things that would 
combine MouseText with the 16-color foreground/background text mode of 
the Ext 80 col/RGB card - but it looks like they are mutually exclusive. 
 Anyone have any further thoughts?  I suppose just replacing a chip on 
the AUX card would far too neat and easy to be an actual possibility?