Steven,

I would try the following two ideas.  This is not exactly what you are
looking for but hopefully will be helpful nonetheless.

1. AI Squared has another magnifier program, other than Zoomtext, called
BigShot.  It only costs $99.  Not free, but relatively inexpensive for what
it does and probably comparable to the type of thing you are looking for
hardware to do, which would also cost around $99 if there is such a thing.
Go to http://www.aisquared.com, click on the products link, then see the
link for BigShot.

2. Try browsing around the Magnifiers webpage at http://www.magnifiers.org.
Reviews and downloadable trials of many screen magnifiers..may even have
some freeware or shareware on there, but I am not sure.

Good luck.
Mike
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steven Whatley" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, January 03, 2002 11:23 AM
Subject: Destop zooming software or hardware


> Hi all,
>
> I have a friend that is looking for some freeware/shareware desktop
> zooming software.  I know of ZoomText and some of the other commercial
> program.  But, I'm looking for something basic that would give me a 4x
> (2x2 pixels) or 16x (4x4 pixels) view of my desktop.  It should also let
> me smoothly pan across the desktop.  I'm not talking about Windws 98/ME/XP
> accessibility magnifier.  The whole desktop is magnified.
>
> For example: Let's say I have my desktop set at 1600x1200.  At 4x, I see a
> 800x600 area of the desktop either by using 800x600 resolution or 2x2
> pixels at the 1600x1200 resolution.  Then at 16x, I see a 300x400 area of
> the desktop.  As one moves the mouse pointer to the edge of the view, the
> view smoothly shifts in the appropriate direction.
>
> Yes, I'm describing what the Matrox video cards can do in hardware.  This
> person has two systems with Matrox cards in them.  He is looking for
> software that has similar functionallity for his third system that uses a
> ATI Readon video card.
>
> A year ago, I went on my own quest for such a program tthat would work
> with my TNT based video card.  I came up empty handed so I went ahead and
> bought a Matrox video card.  Does commercial products loke ZoomText do
> this?   Are commercial software magnifiers the only option?
>
> How about a hardware device that would go in between the video card and
> monitor that would either let the video signal pass through or send a
> zoomed view of the screen?  It would be nice if such a device could handle
> input resolutions of 1600x1200 or higher.  I may be interested in this
> myself.
>
> Thanks,
> Steven
>
>
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