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

[Jim Battle]

Richard wrote:
> One of these just sold on ebay item # 290186096576
> 
> I was looking at it because its graphics (I have no S-100 machines),
> but even had I remembered to bid on it I would have been priced out
> :-).
> 
> Are graphics boards for S-100 machines common at all?  It seems not.

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.  I have a 
couple of each, although I haven't set them up yet.  They date from 
about 1978 or so.  Their speed was amazingly slow.  Even though the 
Apple II managed to fit in a CPU access and a graphics access in each 
memory cycle, the Matrox card allows the CPU twiddle a single pixel per 
50 uS scanline (during hblank), so about 20K pixels/second.  In other 
words, a 4 MHz Z80 could execute about 25-50 instructions for each pixel 
it output.

(Richard, I know you know the following, but since a short thread a 
month or two ago indicates that some people are unaware how far computer 
graphics hardware has come since 1978, I thought I'd go on a bit)

Now 30 years later, graphics cards have 512 MB of RAM (and more), sport 
virtual memory (the graphics processor can take page faults in the 
latest generation of chips), process dozens of pixels per clock at 600 
MHz and use single precision FP representation per color channel, allow 
general shader programs per vertex and per pixel (including 
conditionals, loops, subroutines, computing transcendentals in a single 
clock, 3d textures with advanced filtering, etc).  Oh, and costs less 
than that 1978 Matrox card even ignoring inflation.  This perf/$ curve 
greatly exceeds even that of the microprocessor over the same time span.

Matrox is still around and still selling graphics cards for PCs, 
although they command a vanishingly small segment of the market these days.

There were other graphics cards on S-100 too.  I've seen (recently) an 
S-100 card that had one of the TI bitmap & sprite generator ICs on it.