Graphics for S-100 machines (MicroAngelo S-100 Graphics Board by SCION)

[Chuck Guzis]

On 3 Dec 2007 at 18:05, Jim Battle wrote:

> Matrox S-100 graphics cards appear once in a while on ebay.  They made 
> character generators and bitmapped displays as well.  They could be 
> ganged to make grayscale, or even palettized color, and they made it 
> easy to sync them so you could overlay graphics and text. 

...and there were others besides the usual gang of Polymorphic, 
Cromemco, Vector and North Star.  Not rare, just uncommon.

I remember one very nice one (or set)--the MicroAngelo from Scion.  
Initially a monochrome version with its own Z80, I think later 
editions included multiple planes for color.  Very nice and very 
expensive.

One of the problems was the terminal-centric view--i.e. many S100 
boxes simply communicated with a terminal over a serial link--far too 
slow for decent graphics, although there were color graphics 
terminals.  And CP/M knew nothing of graphics; there was no 
"standard" graphics interface as there was on, say the Apple II or 
the PC, so applications software was a problem.

What is hard to appreciate from this time is how revolutionary any 
sort of non-TTY interface software was.  WordStar, for example, was a 
real eye-opener--you hit ctrl-Y to delete a line and it vanished from 
the display and succeeding lines scrolled up to close up the gap.  
Amazing!

Real meaningful graphics applications would have to wait a bit to 
become the rule, rather than the exception.   Certainly, larger 
memory spaces and faster CPUs didn't hurt.

Cheers,
Chuck