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MaxAppleZoom and Monitor Expander - potential display upsizing?

Bunsen

Admin-Witchfinder-General
Article over on LEM says:
 

Way back in the Mac II era, someone discovered that certain Mac NuBus video cards [can] support higher resolutions than 640 x 480 pixels – but only with certain displays [*]. MaxAppleZoom, a control panel by Naoto Horii [was] designed to support those higher resolution.

MaxAppleZoom (a.k.a. MAZ) is ancient history – 1993 was the final revision. It allowed 704 x 512 pixels.

This only works with a handful of Apple video cards [**], not with built-in video or any non-Apple card.

... another control panel, Monitor Expander, does the same thing but with a lot more resolution options
 
[*]13" AppleColor High-Res, 12" Monochrome and High-Res Monochrome
[**] Mac II (Toby), Mac II High-Res, 4/8, 8/24 


Anyone ever use these back in the day?  While they are both long gone, it might be interesting to dig them (or Mr Natao) up for investigation.

 

 
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olePigeon

Well-known member
Those sound cool.  I've never heard of them.

I know people always talk about Macintosh Garden, but there're a lot of shareware and freeware titles that don't make it on there, like these two Monitor apps.  My "The Art of Darkness" book mentions 4 or 5 freeware and shareware After Dark modules that are now unobtanium.  All the original FTPs & websites have gone dark, all the commercial sites only ever hotlinked, and no one bothered to back them up. :(

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
I've heard very briefly of these. If I remember correctly: this mode came from pixel-doubling the output of the Apple IIe LC-PDS card. I haven't heard of any other tools that you can use to get to it, but most displays that the LC family supports allow it in one way or another. So, most of Apple's own fixed-sync displays at least up to the 14" ones support it. The 16" one probably does but on a Mac you'd use that at the higher resolution of 832x624 most of the time. Larger displays weren't initially supported by the LC and LCII so I doubt that Apple bothered to make those displays compatible with this mode, or tested it extensively if it does "happen" to work.

I can't speculate as to why it was built into NuBus video cards except perhaps that someone internally wanted to test it to get more out of a hardware budget or that Apple had been throwing around the idea of building a NuBus IIe card or similar.

In newer times, I used a tool called SwitchRes to work around my fixed-mode adapter's configurations on newer multisync machines, such as the 7300 (but really: almost any machine newer than Quadra 700/900 in 1990 is likely to have some additional pixel functionalities) and also to work around the "default" list of resolutions on my blue-and-white and the monitors I was using. It let you select from a list of common resolutions if you had a fixed-sync adapter and it let you pick from a fairly long list of suggestions of modes. I don't know if they were pre-determined or if they were calculated or guessed.

 

Dog Cow

Well-known member
Those sound cool.  I've never heard of them.

I know people always talk about Macintosh Garden, but there're a lot of shareware and freeware titles that don't make it on there, like these two Monitor apps.
They're on Mac GUI, however, which is a much larger archive than Macintosh Garden.

 
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