HIGH-RESOLUTION COLOUR GRAPHIC WORKSTATION R. KARG a n d J. SCHROTER BBC, Postfach 101680, 6900 Heidelberg 1, Federal Republic of Germany (Received 26 March 1984)
The PAN 30 H system and GKS offered by BBC is a modular system exhibiting all features of an easy-touse graphic workstation. The pictures are displayed on a high-resolution raster scan colour monitor with a picture refresh frequency of 72 Hz, ensuring flicker-free displays with a visible resolution of 1024 × 815 pixels. This implies that the system must be capable of handling clock frequencies in excess of 40 MHz. The picture memory has a size of 1024 × 2048 pixels and can be configured with a depth of up to 8 bits. Four freely seleetable windows can be defined on the monitor via the memory addressing unit. The window base can be moved pixel by pixel in the graphic memory, thus permitting smooth rolling of each individual window. The colour table of the monitor interface permits 256 colour and flashing modes to be simultaneously
displayed. The PAN 30 H system is linked to an LSI 11/23 via a microprogrammable DMA interface. By means of the microprogram-firmware specific graphic operations can be performed, e.g. display of poly lines, text, pixel arrays, fill-in, clipping, etc. Linking to the user software is achieved via the standard GKS interface, many of the GKS functions being implemented directly in the PAN 30 H system. In this way, time-consuming conversion of the picture data can be eliminated. Depending on the configuration level of the LSI system, the GKS operates as a standalone unit, with connection to a host system also being possible. Special user software permits the representation of process data and picture updating via graphic variables.