640x480 sucks!

[quinterro]

I've been tinkering with my 8100/110 with a G3/400 upgrade. It was using a SuperMac Thunder/24 with DSP video card, but the output to my LCD panel was ghosty. Probably because of the lack of a sync-to-green adapter or something.

Using an HDI-45 to DB15 adapter it finally shows a crisp picture bit it's stuck at 640x480. It's probably due to the DB15 to VGA adapter at the end of the cable, but I can't find out until tomorrow. Unfortunately in order to get it to work the SuperMac video card had to be removed.

Trying to read Slashdot is interesting. The article width is about 1.5".

The battery is low too, and I found a neat side effect. If you don't set the date and time and open this site a blank dialog appears and IE 5.12 crashes.

 

[ChristTrekker]

Using an HDI-45 to DB15 adapter it finally shows a crisp picture bit it's stuck at 640x480. It's probably due to the DB15 to VGA adapter at the end of the cable, but I can't find out until tomorrow. Unfortunately in order to get it to work the SuperMac video card had to be removed.
Trying to read Slashdot is interesting. The article width is about 1.5".

Are you kidding? 640x480 is a luxury! Try 512x384! I sooo badly want to hack my CC...

 

[quinterro]

Fortunately (or not depending on your outlook) I have no 68k Macs. I could get an SE/30 pretty easily, but have no place to put it right now.

After being spoiled on 1280x1024 and 1400x1050 (Thinkpad LCD), 640x480 is a big step down.

Right now I'm trying to get the 8100 working properly again. I spent yesterday evening trying different pairs of SIMMs on it and ended up with 200MB. To prevent having to remove and mount the logic board every time I wanted to swap memory out the board was removed and run bare on my desk with the power supply resting beside it out of the case. It will only boot MacOS 8.6 all of the way if extensions are disabled. At the moment the only card in it is a Sonnet Crescendo G3/400 processor card.

 

[coius]

heh. I know what you mean. I have a PowerBook 520 that is stuck with with 640x480. but that's not the worst of it! It's PASSIVE-MATRIX!!! you are lucky you don't have a passive-matrix screen. Count your blessings!

 

[beachycove]

You think that's bad? That's not bad.

You ought to try working with no screen at all, and having to only IMAGINE what should be on the screen. And having to type with no fingers. Or keyboard. Editing like that takes real skill; separates the men from the boys, let me tell you.

:lol:

 

[luddite]

Are you kidding? 640x480 is a luxury! Try 512x384! I sooo badly want to hack my CC...

Pffft! Anyone who needs more than a 40 x 24 text display is a sissy!

 

[II2II]

You ought to try working with no screen at all, and having to only IMAGINE what should be on the screen. And having to type with no fingers. Or keyboard. Editing like that takes real skill; separates the men from the boys, let me tell you.

Ah, so you've done that too. I'm not as weird as I thought.

Yes, I have serviced computers with only the beep of the speaker and screen flickering on to guide me (fixing driver issues in Windows 3.1 IIRC).

I also considered using a headless Apple IIc to take notes while in University.

I have also heard people advise authors to turn off their monitors while writing, in order to avoid distractions (ranging from using other software, to avoiding editing too early in the writing process).

Of course the blind have to deal with screen readers and braile devices, or screen resolutions that are effectively much lower than 640x480 (i.e. they use screen magnifiers).

Personally, I don't think that 640x480 is scary to use. Modern websites make it difficult to use that resolution, but that's a product of decisions that website designers make. For example, the edit window for this message uses about 1/8th of my screen at 1024x768. Think about that. The task that I'm performing involves about 15% of my screen. That's about 40% of a screen running at 640x480. Pure and unadulterated waste.

 

[beachycove]

I did some comparisons a while ago of Nisus Writer Pro running on a widescreen monitor (the "family" G5 iMac) and of Nisus Writer "classic" on a Duo (@640x480). There was a difference of a grand total of a couple of lines (!) between the two in terms of the number of lines displayed (advantage iMac), at the default resolution in NWPro (and anything much smaller makes text effectively unreadable). It was the same with Pages, Mellel, etc.

Most of my work is word processing and text editing. Yes, you get "wings" with appropriate software on a widescreen display, but I frankly don't find those much use for writing purposes, as I tend to work mainly on lengthy text documents, and tend not to need or want to look at anything other than the words that I am working on when I happen to be working. 640x480 was and is very limiting if what you want is page layout, but it is fine for what most computers of ye mid-90s were mainly bought for, which was wordprocessing, coupled with database/ spreadsheet or modest multimedia/ games. The old 800x600 monitor resolution was also very good in actual use, mainly because the screen was generally physically scaled up to accommodate the extra pixels (alas, the physical scaling couldn't continue as the resolutions grew larger, because the CRTs could only grow so big).

Higher resolutions for some uses honestly are not as useful for some everyday purposes. If you can't easily read text on screen at 12 point, in other words, there's a mismatch between your equipment and the task you are asking it to do, and it is fundamental to good workmanship that to each task there is a tool.

Mind you, I really like my 20" ColorSync CRT, the real estate on which is so much more usable than it is on a 20" LCD widescreen, simply because the CRT is physically so much larger. However, I never have it set to display its maximum 1600x1200, as it too then becomes unusable. Unfortunately, it seems at the moment to be on the way out....

 

[equill]

My 17-in. CRT Studio Display futzed on me within hours of my remarking to my wife that it was one of the best (read most useful) buys that I had ever made. Since my writing (mostly) combines developing documents in concert with comparing with/pillaging from older versions, two side-by-side WYSIWYG pages, even with some overlap, are a great convenience. So I sympathize. I sympathize. I deeply sympathize. However, it was the stimulus of mors machinamenti pinacothecarum that caused me to set up a G4 DA with a 20-in. Cinema Display. Should have done it years ago. Where there's a will there can be not only beneficiaries but also benefits.

de

 

[juan123]

I'd say its bad with anything that has OS 8 and newer. Windows and icons just seem huge next to OS 7 and System 6.

 

[Blessed Cheesemaker]

For working on single documents at a time, I love 640x480. If I want to work with multiple windows, then 800x600, or (even better) 832x6?? is even better.

My opinion is that higher resolutions is only so marketers and advertisers can fling more ads at you while you are surfing.

If you are working on two documents at a time, I can see that a bigger monitor, higher resolution could be useful. If I am doing 2 things at a time (surfing and word processing), I find having two monitors to be the best solution. I also love multiple desktops, but that isn't an option in the classic OS...or is there a shareware program out there for that?

 

[yestermac]

I had the Supermac Thunder II in my 8100 and it wasn't as fast as the PDS video card. I think it's because Nubus is so much slower then the PDS. The Thunder II left window artifacts all over the screen if I moved them too fast. Did you get the PDS adapter for your sonnet card? It will allow you to mount the PDS video card upside down in your 8100. The AV card only supports 2 meg of vram but the non-AV supports 4 meg and that's plenty for most monitors even with millions of colors. If A/V isn't that important to you I'd go for more VRAM.

Opps: I mean HPV card instead of PDS..