CompuServe Messages

Tell you what — I _know_ my users could swallow a four color screen if it was 1024 by whatever. Now — are y'all ready for a NASTY hardware hack idea? Hmmm? This has been done already here, to another machine, but it's all the same. Here we go. You set up the display (as far as the AMiga knows) for 640x 400y 4bp. Now, this results in said video being applied to the color circuitry four bits at a time. At this point, you steal it, jam it into a 2×2 shift register, lock down the now-unused most or least significant two bits of the color palette, and hum those four bits out as two pairs of two bits. Such a device needs access to a dot clock… of some sort. It also needs access to a bit somewhere that tells it to run or not run. Which _may_ be available in the machine, or you could go positivly _nuts_ and make this thingee an auto configure device, with appropriate register and all — put it some where the COPPER could smack it in the teeth… and _really_ integrate it into the Amiga properly. Should cost about 25-50 bucks to do right. This would give you 1280 by 400… nothing to sneer at, believe me. SoftCircuits did _exactly_ this kind of thing for the radio shark color computer — we stole the incoming data to the 6847 VDG and completely reformatted it for 128 by 256 16 32 grey level video. If anyone is curious how, the schematic is called "CoCoGrey" and is in the Scheme demo posted here. How about that? I would think that an end user cost of <$100 should be attainable — and that it would then be totally transparent to _any_ software that didn't specifically want to use it. If you _DID_ want to use it, you could have 1280 by 400 or 1280 by 200 (talk about mismatched x/y ratio!) without the proposed mod knowing or caring. You could also implement extensions to this idea — like a local palette to control the other two bits that get locked when the 4->2 bit conversion is made. Any hackers out there wanna take a swing at this? SoftCircuits is not set up for hardware manufacturing — but _if_ no one goes for this, mebbe we will anyway. –Ben–