Author: Jay Craswell (67.50.131.61)
Date: 09-06-2013 19:28
This is probably the longest time between question and answer ever. For Historical purposes I wanted to post some graphics card history because there were not a lot of "high res" cards for the Atari series of computers.
I designed the cards for the Moniterm Viking. That was the fastest give us a working prototype for the software guys project that I ever did. The MegaSTE "Isacc", and the TT (or other VME based machines) the AlberTT. Oh! And I forgot one. I designed a true colour VME card that predated... Anything. I had to make my own "DACs" using discrete ttl parts and resistor totem poles. Video Dacs didn't exist yet. "Truecolor" didn't exist.
This won't mean anything to anyone but people who layout PCBs but all of these projects were version 1's. No ECOs (added Wires or cut traces) on any of these designs. Everyone of those projects were direct to production. Ask anyone who designs hardware how insane good that had to be (Or total OCD)
Slavic Lozebin (*his name is probably spelled wrong) from Atari wrote the display driver for the Moniterm. Mark Medin worked on the logic on the MegaSTE card when we worked together at Image Systems. Both - brilliant (and nice) guys.
Anyway I'm a little bit hurt by the comment on my stuff being slow. They were bit mapped and the CPU wrote to video ram at full speed. (Bit Blitting etc) was off in the future. And unlike CPT I didn't have $14k to spend on the first two asic chips.
The 68000 in the Mega was ok The TT wasn't bad for pushing pixels around. Remember that unless you were writing direct to video ram everything went through GEM to get to the screen. GEM was great but (my opinion) written more to be be portable then for speed. And the amount of memory you moved in the original Atari Video modes was a heck of a lot smaller then any of the designs I did.
This is all ancient stuff but I recall a lot of surprise from the Atari universe that major software packages like Calimus just "worked" on all of these designs without any software changes. Pre Moniterm, Image Systems or Dover Research Corp was a double highPC "herc" card at CPT designed by John Sackmeister. Edit a full page of text at once? That was pretty high tech when 80286s were the "high speed" CPUs... But that wan't enough because John also added a complete Z80 "machine" with a pre everything CPT high speed video board using one AT slot.
John is the first people I ever heard of that took a complicated design full of descrete parts and turned it into a custom ASIC. And it worked 100% the first time. John was another "non degreed" engineer. I wonder what ever happened to him?
Back to GEM for a second - Gem on the IBM PC with John's "high res" IBM display was able to run Ventura Publisher without writing anything other then a small video driver. I won a bet because of that! A fellow named Rich Jones (Also Brilliant) wrote one of the first Windows video drivers and that ran Pagemaker without a line of code changed.
RE: looking 4 tt030 vme video card..