The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.
Would be the kind of product you see demoed on The Computer chronicles from Eagle New Global Tech corporation, you gander at it thinking "Wow, one day I will get that" and then you never hear from the company again as they only sold 4,000 units.
Back in the VGA days, I worked for a video card maker, and one of them supported a multi-head configuration. You could stick as many as 16 into one machine, if it had enough slots. Thus driving 16 monitors at once. I was responsible for taking the stock Windows 3.1 display driver for the chipset and modifying it for multi-head support. That was a really fun and challenging project, and ultimately very satisfying. I am pretty sure there were a few customers who needed the full 16-card setup.
BTW this was done in the day when drawing pixels on a screen was all done via the CPU telling the card "draw /this/ pixel with /this/ color". Good times!
You could use the hot lines from RBG as the binary id (2^3) of the monitor and then average up the RBG intensity from the hot lines as the result. This would give you 8 monitor support.
Or you could limit it to 3 monitors but two hot lines pick the monitor and then you can sum the intensity on those two hot lines two double your fidelity.
If you do the two line color system you could have a YC signal of luminance (Y) and chrominance (C) and thus you have a color signal.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 13.4 ms ] threadThe trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.
So like most of the gadgets from the 90s.
BTW this was done in the day when drawing pixels on a screen was all done via the CPU telling the card "draw /this/ pixel with /this/ color". Good times!
This would have been quite the product then. TVs were expensive, but B&W TVs not so much.
Or you could limit it to 3 monitors but two hot lines pick the monitor and then you can sum the intensity on those two hot lines two double your fidelity.
If you do the two line color system you could have a YC signal of luminance (Y) and chrominance (C) and thus you have a color signal.