Prior to Gemini, I think this was originally sold by Lucas-Nascom as their Colour Graphics Card, although it was called the Pluto and designed by IO Research Ltd.
Sold by Gemini under the part number IO828, this was a powerful graphics card at the time. It had its own Intel 8088 cpu and memory, so was basically a computer in its own right – similar to a modern graphics card in fact!
- 768 x 576 colour graphics
- 192K RAM
- 8088 or V20 processor (for up to 30% faster performance)
The piggy-back board is a IO830 Mini Palette board. In theory these could be changed depending on application, but I don’t think anything other than the standard board was available in any quantity. This allowed a choice of any 8 colours to be selected from a palette of 4096.
Oh, did I forget to say it was also pretty expensive?
nascom.info 