CompuServe Thread

Sounds absolutely correct. Likewise, why are all of those people playing cards ($3 for a 'real' deck) on that same $3000+ CPU, graphics card, etc…? Makes one think…have we lost sight of why we are buying these machines? Remember, video killed the radio star.

I've also heard of something called TAPEDISK. I bumped into the company who made it because they're in Wisconsin, too, and I alerted them to the market potential in the 3D Studio crowd. They'd never heard of it. It appears to be a similar device, a way to put a file system on a tape device. You might ask around in the 'go asoft' forum to find a user of TAPEDISK.

Actually, most video overlay cards don't incur much of a processor penalty. They use the VGA "feature connector" to superimpose the digitized video into areas with a certain color, say, pukey purple. If you remove some of these cards, you can still start the TV program, but you only see a purple window. As long as the audio is coming from the TV card itself, there's little to no overhead. Of course, there are other problems with RF noise in a computer environment, another plus for the standalone tuner and monitor. I do have cable here at the office, supposedly to provide a stable video signal to my Toasters. 😉 I've also got a pair of nifty $150 gizmos from the Damark mail order catalog. It's a cable tuner with remote, but it also switches audio and video between three other composite video with stereo signals, and it's also got picture-in-picture. I cascaded them so I can watch two signals at once, if necessary, but I also made it easy to switch between three-four other video signals here on my desk. The only deficiency is that the remote doesn't have a "jump back to previous channel button," which I miss. You can independently choose between the four signals for the main and PIP pictures.