OT: Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[Fairlight]

At Sat, Apr 03, 2004 at 10:30:23PM -0500 or thereabouts, 
suspect Bill Vermillion was observed uttering:
> 
> However mice and keyboard can and often do go away - and part of
> that is because of the methods MS uses - it polls everything -
> while the Unix side uses interupts - and they can get lost.  That's
> why the electronic one that always present signals to the computers
> attached as if there was a keyboard are much better. 

I'm not sure if you meant "UNIX" or *nix, but the older parallel print
driver in linux used to be a polling driver, not interrupt-driven.  I have
no idea if it's been changed, as I haven't dealt with non-remote printers
since about '95.

> Windows of course has the umpty-jillion-colors possiblity -
> depending on video card and drivers.  I just checked my XP drivers
> and I have a choice of 16 bit color or 32 bit [and most people run
> in 32 bits] but the setcolor mode for the text mode is basically
> the a 4 bit color mode - 3 bits for color and one bit for
> intensity.

Actually, more people tend to run in 16bpp color, in my experiences.
That's possibly changed with the prevalence of better video cards, but a
few years back you were lucky sometimes if they were set higher than 8bpp.

I -can- run 24bpp at my resolution, but prefer I actually keep it at 16bpp.
There used to be a performance hit associated with 24bpp.

And XFree86 is perfectly capable of doing 24bpp on any reasonable video
card, btw.  Memory was actually the biggest consideration on that--you
needed 4MB minimum to do 24bpp at 1024x768, and nowadays I don't think you
can find a video card with less than 32MB, so it's not an issue.

mark->
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