Wow! Looks very impressive even though I can't understand any of it!    

external color input card?

External color card

An external color card to test the NICK EC3..EC0 inputs has been created, it is a bit the product of the imagination of enterpriseforever.com members.

Of course this is not a problem, in fact... the original intention of the Enterprise creators was that these inputs allowed the machine to connect an electronic device to be able to display hardware sprites on the screen.

However - due to its construction - there are several other possibilities. But the main purpose is to show sprites.    

The essence of this is,  a program loads the sprite image into a special memory, then the hardware "crawls" it over the original Enterprise image In the correct position.

This position can be adjusted, so moving the sprite means translating the coordinates to the card's processor, which is much less work than if it's "copied" (with proper masking) to the image generated by NICK.
 
On the Enterprise hardware, NICK is designed to allow the EC3.. EC0 inputs pass-through the colouring circuit  and then they appear on the monitor screen.


Nevertheless, this is also possible at the highest resolution, because the sprite image from the outside can be 16 colors at maximum resolution, whilst the original image of Enterprise could have only up to 2 colors per line.
 
On the past it has been assumed that only a few sprites could be displayed. But now has come to mind the idea that you do not have to send sprite images to NICK, you can even get a full screen content from the outside. This means that the mode(s) can be shown with a structure that could not be originally displayed by the original NICK (for example a resolution of 640(or more)×288, that NICK can only show in 2 colors, but can be displayed with 16 colours from the outside).

Conclusions:
 
1. This is good for game developers because sprites do not need to be displayed from a program routine (not always possible), but directly by the hardware. The "precious" CPU time can be used for something else. But that will benefit the players as well, because the enhanced effect will apear on our computer screen too. So "this will be good" for all.
 
2. There is no video connector on the card, the card itself is the one that generates the data in the EP, and that's what this project is about. So, "softly the data is sent, from the card to the EP"♪♫.
 
3. Definitely, the card can not be directly used as an "external video card". Ie, surely it can be used as a video card, but the resulting picture will be always limited by the palette and video output of the EP. What is improved over NICK's skills is the number of colors that can be used for higher resolution, and about this I have some ideas to take advantage of (For example, you can perform super-smooth hardware horizontal scrolling...).
 
This is the current state of the project, but hardware of this kind tend to "multiply" its complexity as time passes and new knowledge surfaces, so there is a lot of challenge in it. I hope this story had a more "epic" view from the Enterprise users side...

If you have any questions regarding this subject, I will reply them at the "Tesztelés" topic on the enterpriseforever.com forum.

Any correction? Does it resemble the original intention of the Hungarian text? Should I continue?


Is anybody out there....?