New answers tagged graphics
4
The normal method of changing between the uppercase/graphics character set and the lowercase character set on the Commdore 128 is by printing the control characters, like so:
PRINT CHR$(142):REM SELECT UPPERCASE, or,
PRINT CHR$(14):REM SELECT LOWERCASE
The same control characters will also work in your BASIC programs that use a bitmap screen mode and the ...
2
is it possible
Yes, but what would it add to a 2D sprite/blitter with masking (aka transparency) ? Basically those are tiles.
Some sophisticated hardware could have some notion of priority between those tiles to choose which one to display "on top" of the others. And maybe handle collisions (only useful between field objects). That would be an improvement. ...
7
With only a 250W power supply you may be pushing the limit with two video cards, but it's hard to be sure. Neither of the video cards you're planning on using are particularly power hungry. I suspect nether comes with a fan, and the GeForce2 MX may not even have a heat sink. The PCI connector can only supply 25W and I believe the AGP 1.0 interface had the ...
1
That's tricky. PC video cards had to be compatible with old CGA/MGA/EGA/VGA standards over ISA which didn't offer plug and play and remapping.
Your two video cards may be incompatible, conflicting over accesses to registers, for example the palette or Video RAM in A0000.
0
The other answers mention PS/2 and MCA but don't quite bring out the political dimension.
The history behind it is that when IBM came fairly late to the 16-bit PC market, populated with a wide variety of hardware architectures (all loosely based around the 8086, and unified by all being compatible with Digital Research CPM/86) they did so with an unusually ...
1
I would suggest that choosing an industry group’s standard rather than that of a single company is obviously preferable to anyone not in that single company.
16
I think that this was part of the larger trend of IBM losing the leadership of the “PC”, especially after the PS/2 and the MCA debacle (although the PS/2 line did introduce many new features which became de facto PC standards).
Looking at graphics specifically, after the VGA, IBM developed the 8514/A and then the XGA. For most consumers these had several ...
29
VGA was introduced in 1987 with IBM's PS/2 line. NEC and VESA developed SuperVGA in 1988, but at the time it used the old and slow 8/16-bit ISA bus.
Improving video performance was a top priority at NEC to help sell its
high-end displays as well as its own PC systems. By 1991, video
performance had become a real bottleneck in most PC systems. (316)
...
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