[rescue] NCD 88K Xterminal video adapter

[Nathan Raymond]

With enough bandwidth, you can be pretty inefficient. Back in college in
'95 I enjoyed playing id Software's Doom on the SGI Indy workstations.
Everyone typically played it locally on the workstation they were on. I
knew there were some SGI machines with higher specs than the undergrad
workstations, and one day I was curious what kind of performance I'd get by
running it on one of those workstations and displaying it back to mine, so
I gave it a try. I don't remember the performance being that different, but
I was very distracted because I wasn't hearing any audio, and quickly
realized that meant that the game audio was probably coming out at that
remote workstation (which I wasn't sure where it even was or who might be
on it), so I immediately closed the game. Years later I was at a party and
someone was telling a story about how one day the sounds of Doom suddenly
started playing on their SGI and it scared the heck out of them. I
sheepishly admitted that it was probably me who was responsible for that.
We had a good laugh about it.


On Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 10:35 AM Mouse via rescue <rescue at sunhelp.org>
wrote:

> > I remember learning that in X windows the server/client are the reverse
> of w$
>
> Yes.  The desktop machine is providing services (loosely put, I/O
> device - screen, keyboard, mouse - access) to the machine where clients
> (X clients, that is) are running.  (Also, a minor note: to quote the X
> docs, "it's a window system called X, not a system called X Windows".)
>
> > The issue would be that it is more efficient to to send a character
> string t$
>
> Worse than that.  "Modern" clients don't draw characters as bitmaps.
> They do antialiasing and subpixel rendering and suchlike.  (My terminal
> emulator, which does have a mode in which it uses a client-side font,
> gets usable speed out of it by (a) not doing stuff that, like
> antialiasing, requires more than 1bpp and B9) pushing the character
> glyphs to the server _once_, to pixmaps, then drawing them by teling
> the server to copy from the pixmaps.)
>
>                                         Mouse
>
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>
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