Re: Refresh rates (XyDos in XP Window)

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from Patricia M Godfrey  on Mon, 24 Feb
2003 12:15:31 -0500

> "poor screen refresh implementation" was
> blamed for the problem...
> "Refresh rate," for those who mightn't recall, means how often the
> electron gun sweeps across the array of pixels that make up a screen,
> thus redrawing the image on the screen.

True -- but I wasn't talking (except perhaps too loosely, I don't recall) about
_that_ kind of refresh rate, which (IMO) has _nothing_ to do with the problem.
I was talking about screen updating, i.e. repainting the screen with fresh
information -- displaying the actual current data status in a timely manner.
That's why Windows was acting jerky: it wasn't smoothly updating the VDM
window. Display was lagging behind keystrokes in a spasmodic, irregular way.
Possibly CPU cycles (time slices) aren't apportioned equitably, or the VDM has
too low priority. Anyway, that's the problem I put to David Thomas, and he
understood it immediately -- confirmed that it was a known issue. I thought
that his work with Tame went a long way toward ameliorating the problem; but I
guess, not enough to satisfy everyone. At that point, I kind of "tuned out".

I very much doubt that this problem will be solved by fiddling with the video
card or horizontal refresh.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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