Ater looking more closely at the display on the website pics, it appears as
if the display is strictly monochrome (black and white, with no grayscale
capabilities).
Even so, it could look better. After all, the original Apple Macintosh was
also black and white and it looked fantastic. The original Palm Pilot was
black and white, and it also looked fantastic. (Interestingly, both the
Orion and the Palm Pilot use the Motorola Dragonball processor, an evolution
of the original M68000 processor used in the Macintosh.) There is
absolutely no reason from a hardware point of view why the Orion's display
can't look as nice as a black and white Palm Pilot.
(It would really have been cool if Ten-Tec had put a touchscreen on the
Orion, or perhaps even licensed part of or the whole Palm Pilot OS.)
The pictures on the Ten-Tec website are bitmaps instead of JPEGs, so I'm
wondering if there is an Orion display emulator that runs on a PC for
development purposes... and if so would Ten-Tec be willing to let other
people use it in order to try mocking up different display looks?
I can already visualize some differences that would make the display much
clearer and much more attractive.
- jgc
John Clifford KD7KGX
Heathkit HW-9 WARC/HFT-9/HM-9
Elecraft K2 #1678 /KSB2/KIO2/KBT2/KAT2/KNB2/KAF2/KPA100
Ten-Tec Omni VI/Opt1
Alinco DR-605TQ
Icom T90A
email: kd7kgx@arrl.net
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