Re: Xy on XP

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from "Patricia M. Godfrey"  on Sat, 20
May 2006 14:40:48 -0400


> We need to get an agreed-upon terminology here, because this whole
> question turns on the issue of "Windowed" vs. "Full screen"; I'm
> beginning to suspect that NOBODY escapes the jerky cursor when running
> windowed under XP, though some either don't run windowed (you and Carl,
> IIRC) or don't find it sufficiently annoying.

That seems to be correct. It is endemic in XP. I avoid it (and a plethora of
other ugly stuff) by not using XP! Simple, eh? But almost all other machines
around me do use XP mainly, so I am agonizingly familiar with the problem. I'd
like to take another look at Tame v5. Has anybody posted their complete TAM
file settings?

I use the terms FullScreen and Window exactly as you do. That, indeed, is what
"Windows" is mainly about: windows on the Desktop. We get into difficulty
ONLY when people who never use FullScreen -- who always work in a window --
start talking about sizing their window (usually forced via a big terminal
font) to something the covers the entire Desktop. They think that constitutes
"full screen". From there we descend into the miasma.

No, DOS windows are not all 640x480. In fact, they're never 640x480. That
would be something like an 8x18 font, but the math doesn't work out vertically.
No, take a look at a DOS window font dialog sometime -- the raster fonts! If
the font size is, say, 16x37, it covers nearly the whole of the Desktop at
1280x1024 resolution. Why? Because it's 16*80 (=1280) by 37*25 (=925). The
raster sizes TELL YOU the resolution! So if you run at 1024x768, then a size
around say 12x28 is gonna cover everything except the taskbar. You gotta do
the math in your head. I can't remember whether 9x gives you the raster sizes;
NT certainly does. Since you're in a DOS window anyway, just use the handy SET
/A command to do command line math, e.g. "SET /A 28*25" returns 700. (I
don't think COMMAND.COM's SET accepts an /A parameter -- but KMD.EXE certainly
does, so you could say "KMD /C SET /A 12*80", which returns 960.

I see no reason to be scared of the black screen. Turn on the lights first.

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