Scorpio News |
July–September 1987 – Volume 1. Issue 3. |
| Page 38 of 67 |
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Although the Pluto 1A boards (and some of the other Pluto products, as you will see below) are 80-BUS compatible, many people choose to use them with other computers. Consequently a case, with power supply, may be bought for Pluto 1A, with various interface boards available for connecting to these other computers.
Pluto 1 case with power supply – £295
Interface cards:
| IBM PC,XT,AT,clones | – | £85 |
| Sirius | – | £85 |
| Apricot | – | £85 |
| RML-Nimbus | – | £85 |
| Q-BUS | – | £450 |
| BBC, VME, VAX | – | POA |
Pluto 2 is Io’s best seller. Still an 80-BUS compatible board, it has grown to 12″ x 8″ to contain all of the electronics. It retains the same 8088 processor and RS232 interface as Pluto 1A, but includes 512K of memory (optionally 1M), has hardware pan and zoom, 256 colours from a palette of 16.7 Million (!), and optional real time frame grabber. This latter option is very impressive, as you would believe that the colour camera was connected directly to the colour monitor, not going into and out of Pluto’s memory. Pricing is equally impressive!
| 768 x 576 dots in 256 colours from 16.7M | – | £2500 | |
| Options – | Frame grabber | – | £300 |
| Memory expansion (gives 2 screens of 768x576, or virtual 768x1152) | – | £950 | |
| Case, including power supplies, fans, video amplifiers, etc | – | £500 | |
Only being able to display 256 colours at a time on the screen is a severe limitation to many people. At that level it isn’t possible to have very smooth shading from one colour to another, and therefore subtle toning and other such effects are just not possible. Io therefore sell a system based on three Pluto 2 boards synchronised together. This means that any screen pixel can be any of the 16.7 Million colours aveilable.
| 24-bit system, in case with power supplies etc. | – | £8750 | |
| Options – | 24-bit colour frame grabber | – | £900 |
| 1.548 Memory expansion (2 screen memory) | – | £2850 | |
Pluto Megares is aimed at CAD applications. It is a 10″x8″ 80-BUS board and is available in two versions. The first uses a non-interlaced display to give flicker-free output; the second provides much higher resolution than the other 80-BUS Plutos already covered. A palette is fitted to these boards, and they also feature hardware pan and zoom and RS232 interface.
| Non-interlaced, 768x576, 16 colours from 4096 | – | £2050 |
| Interlaced, 1024x768, " " " " | – | £2150 |
| Case, including power supplies, fans, etc | – | £500 |
All of the boards mentioned so far are 80-BUS compatible, although they may all be used with a wide range of other computers, as described under “Pluto 1A”.
Io also produced a Pluto 1 equivalent that fitted internally in the Sirius, although I believe that this is no longer in production. On top of all this, they also manufacture two ranges of Pluto boards for IBM PCs and compatibles.
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