CompuServe Messages

AT&T's Targa board is a $2000+ graphics board intended for the PC marketplace. Its claim to fame is that it displays 24 bit high-resolution graphics, which gives you a palette if 16,000,000 colors instead of 4096. To interface a Targa board to the Amiga you need a bridgeboard, as the Targa wants to mate with a PC, not an Amy. Also, the Targa is incapable of real time animation due to the huge amounts of memory that have to be manipulated to produce an image (it has its own video RAM onboard). So sending an image to a Targa board is sort of like printing it: you develop the image on the Amiga with the Amiga resolution and (relatively) limited palette, then "render" it on the Targa for final output. To animate, you'd need a VCR with true single frame capability (the Sony 9850 3/4" SP deck will do this, I believe, for somewhere in the neighborhood of $15K). There are several software packages which permit transferring images from the Amiga to the Targa. In addition to the money issues, there is also the matter of time. I don't own a Targa board (though I freelance at a cable company that does) so I'll defer to someone who does for exact figures, but rendering to a Targa takes a lot longer than rendering an Amiga image; also there's a lot of raw data involved (a single image can contain more data than will fit on a single floppy disk).