This video card would also support fast scrolling of high resolution color screens for games, because it had the indirection of the character pointers, so it was possible to quickly scroll the high resolution display, (or use other effects) by simply manipulating the 1920/1024 bytes of text video instead of the 24,576 bytes of high-resolution video memory. A hard disk interface was also in the works, which would, add a SCSI interface, and the necessary software.
The first model (launched June 1982) looked like the IBM PC, a rectangular base unit with two floppy drives on the front, and a monitor on top with a separate detachable keyboard.
By filling the character pointer memory with values from zero to 1999 this essentially turned the text mode display into a very high resolution graphics mode, with the "font memory", acting as the high resolution Raster graphics video memory.
This meant it could provide a separate programmable character for all of the 1024 (64x16) or 2000 (80x25) characters on the screen.
Remarkably "Aster" was also the name given to a Dutch Supercomputer much later, in 2002. The first version of the Aster consisted of four "Eurocard's", one Z80 CPU card with 64 KB memory, one Motorola MC6845-based video card, one double density floppy disk controller card and one "keyboard/RS232/cassette interface" card.
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