First National Sales Ltd, the Wallingford, Oxford-shire distributors of graphics products, has announced that, following an agreement signed this September, it is now the sole UK supplier of graphic boards and packages from the West German firm miro datensysteme GmbH, (spelling a company name without capitals seems to be a German affectation), which presently supplies graphics cards to the UK Apple Macintosh market. The miroGraph 500 series, consisting of a monitor, single circuit board and a set of software drivers on floppy disks, is aimed at high-end computer-aided design and desktop publishing applications on either PS/2 or AT architectures. First National Sales says it chose to dist-rib-ute miro products because of the range of software application support offered, including AutoCAD, VersaCAD, GEM, Ventura and Windows; performance was another factor, with various benchmarks recording redrawing rates of up to 60,000 for the 500 series; finally, miro’s background as a producer of industrial graphics applications and the quality control procedure used by miro are, says First Nat-ion-al, guarantees of the reliability of the products. Resolution ranges from 1,024 by 768 on the miroGraph 500, and to 1,600 by 1,200 on the 550, with features such as Hardware-Zoom, Hardware Panning, and hard-wired functions like point, circle, rectangle and filling operations. Significant speed increases for AutoCAD and other computer-aided design tools are, claims First National, achieved with the 50MHz 32-bit TMS34010-based miroRendition II graphics controller, which supports VGA, EGA, CGA and 8514/A standards, and can be used with a variety of monitors from IBM, Mitsubishi, NEC, Sony and others. As with the 500 range, most popular software drivers are supplied, and the 1Mb of on-board memory is expandable for computer-aided design applications. For the 500 series, prices range from UKP750 for a basic miroGraph 501 mono graphics board, to UKP8,500 for the top-end 550 1,600 by 1,200 pixel system, with a 20 monitor. The miroRendition II comes in a 16 colour version at UKP1,300, and a 256 colour version at UKP1,700. These products are available now, and will be complemented by the 700 series, by the end of the year. This series uses 32-bit TMS34020 processors, which are claimed to achieve 30 times faster display building times than TMS34010-based systems.
