[Info-vax] Attaching an actual 3.5" floppy drive to SIMH-VAX RXV21 device?

[Paul Sture]

On Fri, 17 Aug 2012 03:54:10 -0700, John Wallace wrote:

> On Aug 17, 8:38 am, Paul Sture <nos... at sture.ch> wrote:
>>
>> How did the graphics cards on the 3100-98s compare with those supplied
>> with the early Alphas?
>>
>> That may sound like an apple and oranges question, but when I had a
>> 3100-38 I could happily use VNC on it to control a PC, but my PWS 600au
>> with an Elsa Gloria card gave unacceptable response times using VNC
>> into the same PC.
> 
> Was the PWS running VMS or was it a Window box? If it happens to have
> been NT, there were lots of sub-optimal things in the NT(s) that the
> nice Mr Gates released for Alpha. Still, some people liked it for some
> applications, for a while.

No, this was on VMS.

> The Elsa Gloria in this picture was probably also a PCI card (probably
> 32bit PCI33, I forget) which means it's relatively a long way from
> processor and memory, which can't be ideal for performance.
> 
> Final point: not all graphics cards are equally good at different kinds
> of graphics. Watching text scroll through treacle on a ZLXp-E3 (?) was
> not good, but watching it do 3D stuff could be quite impressive in its
> day.

I don't think the Elsa Gloria was rated particularly highly but that's 
all I have tried.  I did try an ZLXP card in that box but either it came 
with unsuitable jumper settings or was already iffy, because it would 
simply crash my PWS600au early in VMS startup.

The Elsa Gloria wasn't too bad at scrolling text though chucking enough 
at the video was definitely slower than sending it to a log file.

-- 
Paul Sture