Any way to get lower bit colors?

[olePigeon]

My nifty new video card doesn't do 4-bit, and I have a couple games that require 16-color mode.  It only does 1-bit, 8-bit, and 24-bit.  Any way to enable 4-bit?

Kinda bummed.

 

[Byrd]

I'd say you're out of luck, but I'd see if the video card has some additional software that might let you do 4-bit.

 

[olePigeon]

Nuts.  I'll check the preference file or maybe the Control Panel with ResEdit, see if there's anything in there to change.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

ROTFLMAO! The guy's got 1600x1200@24bit and he's complaining it can't do rudimentary 4bit graphics output?????

Your IIci's MoBo video performance will best that that of your new MONSTER of a NuBus Card anyway . . . for gaming.

.

 

[olePigeon]

I can't help it if some of my games run at 16 colors!

The Radius version of the card does 4-bit, but doesn't do 1-bit, while the Supermac version does do 1-bit, but doesn't do 4-bit.  It's weird.  I understand the skipping of 16-bit color.  I don't know of any apps that require 16-bit that won't run under 24-bit.

If there was a way to use my IIci's video in addition to my NuBUS video, then problem would be solved.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

If you bring that LCD back to life, there's undoubtedly an A/B source switch to choose between the VGA HD-15 feed and the BNC Feed, so you can have one LCD do double duty from the same CPU via the two connectors.

Persnally, I have a 22" CRT to the left, the 20" Dell UltraScan doing 1600x1200 in front of me and another 19" version of same running 1024x1280 in Portrait Mode . . .

. . . actually, haven't had time to hook everything up as yet, I just moved into the bedroom my last roommate trashed. Gotta find another so I'll have money for toys again.

I'm not sure I even have a PCI Card that'll output 2048x1536 to max out the CRT. :-/

 

[olePigeon]

My NuBUS slots are all filled, though.  Wasn't there talk about hacking the IIci or something so you can use both the vampire video and a NuBUS card?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I don't understand, it should work right out of the box. Back in the day, folks oftenran a Grayscale TPD from a NuBus Card and he 13" RGB off the IIci MoBo fot spot color as an economical/workable DTP setup.

Vampire video only has one fairly long tooth in the IIci, in the IIsi it has huge fangs and CLAWS. \\\*vv*///

.

 

[olePigeon]

Oh, OK.  I'll give it a try.  For some reason I thought that the onboard video was disabled if you had a video card installed.

 

[Paralel]

If you bring that LCD back to life, there's undoubtedly an A/B source switch to choose between the VGA HD-15 feed and the BNC Feed, so you can have one LCD do double duty from the same CPU via the two connectors.

Persnally, I have a 22" CRT to the left, the 20" Dell UltraScan doing 1600x1200 in front of me and another 19" version of same running 1024x1280 in Portrait Mode . . .

. . . actually, haven't had time to hook everything up as yet, I just moved into the bedroom my last roommate trashed. Gotta find another so I'll have money for toys again.

I'm not sure I even have a PCI Card that'll output 2048x1536 to max out the CRT. :-/

Does PCI even have the bandwidth to handle a resolution that high?

 

[Elfen]

The last post on this Google post hints that both Mac IIci internal and Mac IIci NUBUS Card videos can be used at the some time.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.unix.aux/khA8Zho_cW8/exUDhTLJG7wJ

Thing is, can the system you are using do the same? I would guess so in the Monitors control panel if it is a later System. But that's my guess. Now to get 2 monitors see it at the same time!

Also, I found this Apple link that explain why some monitors don't work with a Mac and how to get them to work... Its a matter of grounding some pins.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TA40897?viewlocale=en_US#

 

[Gorgonops]

Does PCI even have the bandwidth to handle a resolution that high?

Parallel PCI at the standard 33mhz bus speed is good for 133MB/sec in burst mode. (Some older Macs didn't run the PCI bus that fast.) 2048x1536 at 32 bit color translates to a whopping 12MB frame buffer so... sure, if you were running some sort of application that needed to change *every pixel on the screen at once* (Basically something that displayed a video or a game by rendering a gigantic bitmap in main memory and brute-force shoving it into the framebuffer without using any acceleration or rendering features on the card itself) you'd be limited to around 10 FPS. Of course, that's a pretty ridiculous worst case scenario.

(Any application that needed to push that much bandwidth would probably find itself limited in a whole slew of other respects trying to run on a PCI-only PowerPC Macintosh. I'd be sort of surprised if the main RAM subsystems in the Beige ones are good for 133Mb/sec.)

 

[rsolberg]

Just to give my brain a workout in the morning, I calculated the theoretical ram throughput on my Performa 6360 for comparison. Apple specifies 70ns or faster ram, so that means a clock of ~14.3MHz. 64-bit FPM 5v DIMMs are used in individual banks in this machine, so it's 64 bits wide. 14.3*64/8= 114.4MB/s. Later SDRAM models such as my Beige G3 would be 66*64/8= 528MB/s at maximum. This, of course doesn't take into account latency and overhead between PCI and RAM.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Does PCI even have the bandwidth to handle a resolution that high?

NuBus handles 1600x1200@24bit and 2048x1536 is only a 64% increase in pixels. I don't see where that might pose a problem for PCI, even in its earliest iteration on the Mac.

 

[Gorgonops]

NuBus handles 1600x1200@24bit and 2048x1536 is only a 64% increase in pixels. I don't see where that might pose a problem for PCI, even in its earliest iteration on the Mac.

Well, remember, the bus speed of the slot the card is in has basically nothing to do with how capable the video card can be; unless you're doing something like advanced 3D work where textures are grabbed straight from system RAM the refresh for the monitor comes from the RAM on the card, not across the bus. (IE, the limiting factor is how fast the memory subsystem on the card is, the speed of the RAMDAC, etc.) Where bus speed comes into play is actually updating the display; again, for instance, if you had a 2048x1535 card sitting on a PCI bus *if* you had a sufficiently fast disk/RAM/CPU subsystem to generate bitmap content at an essentially infinite rate you'd still only be able to shove about 10 frames per second into the card's VRAM. (This presumes that the RAM subsystem on the card is capable of sustaining the roughly 700MB/second read rate it needs to update the monitor at, say, 60fps *while* it receives data at 133MB/s, of course.)

To apply the same idea to your Nubus card, at about 4.5MB a frame a 1600x1200 Nubus card is only going to be able to update about 4 frames a second. (Again, this is shoving frames directly from main memory into the framebuffer, and assuming that the memory on the card is dual-ported and zero latency so it can actually take these writes while simultaneously burning a good 400Mb/s-ish of reads to update the monitor.)

This resolution/bus speed mismatch is really painful on old ISA bus PCs; it wasn't unusual to have 50mhz 486 machines saddled with 1024x768 ISA video cards back in the day, and ISA is only really good for about 4MB/sec sustained. Even at an 8 bit color depth that's about 6 FPS, tops. GUI acceleration features could *help* but only so much. At 2.3MB/sec even a 320x240x8 bit video feed pushes the capacity of the bus; this is the reason why Macs and Amigas so badly dominated PCs in the multimedia department until the advent of "Local Bus" and PCI.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

Who uses such resolutions with applications in need of high frame rates? CAD/Medical Imaging and Graphics are a far cry from gaming resolutions.

 

[Gorgonops]

Hey, these days a lot of people expect their games to run at 1080p (about the same pixel count as 1600x1200) and it's only a matter of time before "4k" resolutions will be sold as if they were a must have. (Whether anyone actually "needs" that is a totally separate question.)

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

4k for home movie projection is fine, but gamers who run at such overly high frame rates and then complain they can't go to the theater because the "flicker" gives them a headache are a bree . . .

. . . belay that . . . let's just hope they don't breed.

.

 

[Paralel]

Considering how quickly the hop from 1080p to 4k happened (relatively, compared to the hop from SD to 1080p), I'm hoping to skip 4k altogether and hold out for 8k.