CompuServe Messages

> Kick 3.0 for all < I don't know anything about this board, just read the ad… Again, sorry, but I don't know anything about Retina updates/upgrades except that thay have had their Workbench Emulation out finally… I have gone for MERLIN (by XPert) which comes with 1, 2 or 4 Megs of onboard mem (expandable to 16 Megs onboard and 1 Gig(!) externally), is expandable by way of hardware add-ons. A realtime 24bit RGB – NOT YUV! – digitizer module will be out next month, 24bit genlock and combined board digitizer & genlock will be some time (months) longer. Following 'enhanced modules' are (said to be) under development: memory expansion, video effects generator, compression/decompression module, dsp module and render module (whatever these are… oh, compression/decompression is MPEG(/JPEG) for full motion video digitizing in realtime, video effects generator shall surpass the Toaster (hear, hear! – oh, well Toaster's not available in Germany anyway…) – what's DSP???) It ships with an Intuition (not just Workbench!) emulator which emulates AGA under WB 2.x (i.e. all regular Amiga graphic modes including 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64(EHB), 256, 4096(HAM) and 256000(HAM8) colours!). Emulation is in 4/8bit steps (4, 8, 16, 24 bits) which means that for excample your workbench in 16 colours will be exactly as fast as in 4 colours – MERLIN uses a 16 colour palette anyway. 32, 64(EHB) and 256 colours are all the same speed in 8bit mode, as are 4096(HAM) and 256000 (HAM8). Of course it can do 16.7 Mio colours, resolution depending on installed memory (with my 4 Megs I could do 24 bit in 1280×1024 resolution at 87Hz interlaced, or 1024×768 at 70 Hz non-interlaced. Support for virtual screens is included, so you can have a big screen size on a small monitor and scroll around smoothly thanks to onboard blitter with a performance of 50 Megapixels/sec. MERLIN also supports 'screen-in-screen' and 'screen-in-window', and will be RTG compatible by way of EPROM (empty socket at the mom) when/if C= will have it out. The only things that DON'T work with MERLIN are most games (diskette boot, no use of Intuition), software that doesn't conform to WB 2.x (and over) programming rules and programs that directly address the blitter. MERLIN supports screen promotion (always, this time, not this time, never, ask) and doesn't use ChipMEM (Retina apparantly just copies the ChipMEM display area to Retina for display but this I don't know for sure…). The only problem with my MERLIN is – it doesn't work on my system at all (boot-loop) and I'll have to send it back to them for a replacement (SOB!!!) |^( // Chris coming in from Germany \X/ on AutoPilot 1.051……….