CosmoEx Screencast can it replace VME video cards

[aesloan]

After months of frustration looking for a VME graphics card for my Mega STE rare overly expensive not supported for problems etc, I woke up this morning with an idea that maybe there is a way of getting more screen real estate via a video driver that sends the extended video via the screen cast to an external screen (through via the web browser attached to the larger screen).
I am not a programmer so I don't really know the feasibility of this, I could eventually see a problem with processing power for the extra pixels in the megaste, but on the other hand the old isa cards used with the vma adapters were not really accelerated (as far as I know).

Anyway I just wanted to bounce this idea off of you clever programmers out there.

Andrew

[Jookie]

Hello Andrew,

the current screencast supports the ST(e) resolutions, so if you're looking into showing just native resolution, it's already there.
If you would like to have support for higher resolutions / more colors in Mega STE, it could be done, but even with native resolution the screencast slows down the machine a bit, and if you want a good refresh rate of screencast video, then it slows the machine a lot... So I'm not sure if in the end would be very usable for some work...

Jookie

[Cyprian]

what about skipping screen casting and just create dedicated VDI drivers for Cosmo?

[mikro]

what about skipping screen casting and just create dedicated VDI drivers for Cosmo?

Don't forget there's no magical "Cosmos Bus", everything has to go through the ACSI port. So more stuff on ACSI -> much less responsive hard disk drives.

[Jookie]

what about skipping screen casting and just create dedicated VDI drivers for Cosmo?

Yes, that could be done, although I agree with what MiKRO said - the ACSI has its limits, and doing lot of graphics through it will slow down hard drive stuff...

[Cyprian]

yep, but why not
actually in my case, hdd is used rather rarely - only during starting an application and loading/saving its data files

[1st1]

Interesting idea! Using CE's HDMI output for VDI graphics, I love this idea. It even would be possible to access/use it remotely from network! But it might be slow, don't forget, ACSI and SCSI on ST/TT/Falcon is only 1-2 MB/s. If you have a resoultion of 800x600 in Monochrome, that is already about 500 kBytes screen size. So it could refresh 2-4 full frames per second. For simple VDI operations that might be enough, but displaying bitmap graphics will be slow. Imagine for 256 or truecolor... Maybe running an atari emulator on CE and degrade ST to keyboard/mouse input would solve this thing...

[Cyprian]

So it could refresh 2-4 full frames per second

yep, it could be 2-4 fps when you have to reload whole screen as a bitmap (e.g video) but in case of GEM (AES/VDI) you have to push mainly primitive graphics commands with some small bitmaps

[mikro]

I wonder why you guys insist on video stream so much. Much easier (on the ACSI bus) is some kind of VNC server solution, i.e. it would work other way around -- Atari would send only window coordinates and attributes and CE would render it. Of course, this is not a trivial task but far more exciting. :)

[Cyprian]

Micro, I mentioned "VDI drivers" because I would like to use clean GEM application in higher resolution with more colors.

[MrMaddog]

Maybe running an atari emulator on CE and degrade ST to keyboard/mouse input would solve this thing...

Thinking about how this would work... Clicking on CE_HATARI.PRG would run Hatari on the CE/Pi while prompting the user to switch to the HDMI display, and when Hatari closes it gives keyboard control back to the ST. This could be good for not only using extended VDI modes but also a virtual Falcon.

Then again I was also thinking about using a Pi3 and duel booting between the CE distro and BeePi for running FreemiNT and having two Atari computers inside the ST case...