OT: Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[Bill Vermillion]

On Sun, Apr 04, 2004 at 12:01:02AM -0500, Fairlight thus spoke:
> 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.

I mean all variants of what is refered to as Unix or *n*x.  
*nix would exclude Linux :-)

The discusssion related to KVM which will control only keyboard,
mouse, and video..   Most systems will let you handle printers
either way.  The reason for that is that so many printer cards and
printers on board were developed for the MS world, and even though
you set an IRQ there it is not used.  The add-in cards were
particularly bad in this respect.

And electronic KVM's are the one that will almost always work in
*n*x systems, where the mechanical ones will not.  Belkin's
electronic KVM's get mixed results.

> > 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.

Most of the new video cards will default at 32 bits.  The old *n*x
systems were designed for terminals too and the brighter colors
start with a palette of 8 colors and then the higher level which
would be equivalent of the bold, and the termcaps would send the
proper code to the terminals to use whatever the terminal used for
bold, often that was reversed text.

> 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.

No problems with 32 bit on the video cards of today - I'm thinking
of things that start in the $60 range like the 8X AGP with 32 bits
and 64MB memory, 2048x1536 I have on my XP.  It was the cheapest
card the store sold.  It's a Radeon 9200.  It even has a second
monitor option.   If it weren't for the gamers we'd not have the
inexpensive high-performance boards we see today.

> 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.


The new high end cards - designed for such things a video
produciton with DVI inputs - are amazing.  256MB for texture,
128MB for just the frame buffer, and a few other pieces of RAM here
and there to top out at 416MB on a card.  Price on those are
falling too - but falling from $3000 to $1750 still puts it in the
stratoshpere.

Bill
-- 
Bill Vermillion - bv @ wjv . com