🚀 go-pugleaf

> The lighting in the general area was incandescent, rather than fluorescent.
> The salesman claimed that was an important difference.
> 
Yes it makes a difference. Fluorescent light is not exactly continuous;
sort of pulsating --- much the same as your computer terminal. And the
usual effect is that fluorescent kind of amplify the flickering effect
of your monitor. I probably should know the theorectical reason for this;
I'm an electronic engineer  :-), but fact is I don't !


> My question to the net:  Why do you (not) run 1024 x 768 interlaced on a
> NEC 3D or similar monitor?  Lighting?
> 
With 256 colors, 1024 x 768 interlaced looks a lot better than with 16 colors.
The difference is dithering. Under MS Windows, with 16 colors, dithering
is done to simulate the missing colors. Dithering means that you kind of
have dots of black interpersed over a white background to simulate grey.
Interlace is not good at aligning neighbouring lines with patterns very
well. They usually end up slightly different on each pass. Hence, you
see flicker. I know I'm not explaining this too well, but that's the general
idea.

Other than 16 vs. 256 color, the other reason I can think of not to run
1024 x 768 on NEC 3D is physical size. At 800 x 600, I find characters on
a 14 inch monitor just a little small. It is a lot smaller on 1024 x 768.
Of course you can use 8514 fonts; but that means that you will end up not
gaining any desk space at all (in fact you lose some compared to 800 x 600
with VGA fonts).


> By the way, the VGA card was an Orchid Prodesigner II, which can take up
> to 1 MB of video RAM.  It's $300 for 512 KB, almost $100 more than an ATI card.
>
If you must have 1024 x 768 x 256 colors, you can probably buy some
Taiwanese clone VGA cards (usually using either the Tseng Lab 4000 or
Trident 8900 (??) chip sets) at about half the price. However, if your
idea is to run Windows programs, then, you are likely to find the display
incredibly (sp ?) slow ! Personally, I would wait for those 34010 cards'
price to come down.  Things like Hercules Graphics Station card (best 
price I've seen so far is about $600). They will make Windows run much
faster (like 3 to 10 times faster than the fastest dumb VGA card ?).

Currently I'm using a 386 25 MHz no cache with ATI VGA Wonder at
800 x 600 x 16 colors resolution. Looks pretty good.


Regards,                       ## Life is fast enough as it is ........
Peter Lim.                     ## .... DON'T PUSH IT !!          >>>-------,
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  ... also at: pnl@hpfipnl.HP.COM            Singapore   0410.           SPLAT !


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