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- NeXT-FAQ.internal: Questions about NeXT internal hardware
-
-
- *** Subject: I1. What can be done about older 030 NeXT cubes that have a fan that turns in the "wrong" direction?
-
- The fan on older 030 NeXTs cubes sucks air out of the back of
- the cube which means that it draws unfiltered air in
- through the optical disk on the front of the cube. This
- causes optical disks to succumb to dust must sooner than
- cubes with the new-style fan which turns in the opposite
- direction.
-
- NeXT has apparently reversed their decision regarding
- fan reversal in the case of machines that have been
- upgraded to 040 processor boards. It is now considered
- okay to reverse the direction of fans in these machines.
- If you have many third-party cards installed in your cube
- or an older processor board, you may wish to consider not
- reversing fan direction (overheating could become a
- problem). In any case, do not reverse the fan's polarity,
- only reverse the fan assembly itself. Perhaps the best
- solution is obtain the cleaning kit and OD filter from
- NeXT.
-
-
- *** Subject: I2. Can I connect SONY MPX-111N to my 030 cube?
-
- The SONY MPX-111N internal 2.88 MB floppy drive which is
- shipped with all the new 040 NeXT machines is *not* a SCSI
- device, therefor there is no way of connecting that
- particular drive internally on an 030 system.
-
-
- *** Subject: I3. Why does the OD continually spins up and spins down?
-
- A big problem with the Canon optical drives is that air
- flows through the drive to cool it. Dust accumulates
- inside the drive causing it to fail with the continuous
- spin-up spin-down syndrome. NeXT as part of it's 040
- upgrades provides a dust filter to prevent this. If your
- drive has this problem it usually can be fixed simply by
- cleaning out dust from the drive. NeXT sells a cleaning
- kit for both the drives and the optical disks.
-
-
- *** Subject: I4. How many colors can NeXT machines display?
-
- The monochrome machines can display 4 gray levels. You
- can use color apps on a monochrome machine, they will
- converted into monochrome images and dithered
- accordingly.
-
- Color NeXTstations can combine 4 bits of red, green and
- blue primaries for a total of 4096 "pure" colors. The
- imaging functions dither the image to produce
- intermediate colors.
-
- NeXTdimension can combine 8 bits of red, green and blue
- for 16,777,216. There are not 16 million points on the
- display so all can not be displayed at once. Further
- display technology limits the usable color space.
-
- None of the NeXT products support color look up tables
- where the user can define their own color palette on a per
- window basis. This feature is useful for displaying
- images which have adaptive lookup tables, and display
- pure grayscale images on the color NeXTstation. On the
- NeXTdimension images can be converted to full 24 bit
- representation.
-
-
- *** Subject: I5. Why is my machine so slow when I run the monochrome and NeXTdimension displays?
-
- There is a bug with the window system in which if you select
- the monochrome display as your primary display the
- server will be much much slower. The solution for those
- wishing to use both displays is to select the color
- (NeXTdimension) display as the primary display. The
- most optimal configuration at present with the
- NeXTdimension is to run only the color display.
-
-
-
- --
- Editor:
- Nathan Janette nathan@laplace.csb.yale.edu
-