Re: More on Tame

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from michael.norman@xxxxxxxx on Fri, 07 Mar 2003 17:06:39
-0500

> I bought 5.5 and on three machines have had lots of screen problems. The
> folks on the NB listserv were very helpful (a good list), but no one could
> solve the problem.

That's largely because what they know about computers, plus a dollar fifty,
might get them on the subway (if they could find the entrance). They're nice
people, to be sure; you need a higher-than-usual tolerance for bible-thumpers
and creationists, but people are mostly very civil (notwithstanding one
particularly odious fellow who started screaming "traitor" at anyone who
objected to the U.S. government response to 9/11).

> Specifically the
> screen flickered, the result, if I remember those posts, of a conflict in
> screen handling between the command line and the text box (I'm sure I'm not
> stating this accurately or fully)...
> NB tech support was...well...let's just say, perfunctory.

They also have zero guts. If they stood up as a group and told NB that they
want answers, that they want active NB participation on their maillist,
otherwise they're gonna sit on their pocketbooks -- I reckon they'd get answers
fast. Instead, they mostly stumble around, guessing and wondering and
consoling each other, and being submissive. And oh so polite: another guy
there keeps saying "Thank you" to NB every time NB declines to fix outstanding
problems. While NB says nothing, and allows them to flounder.

> If they
> ever solve the screen issues, NBWin could be a good alternative.

I've not seen any flicker myself. Yes, there's "a conflict in screen handling
between the command line and the text box", namely that the CMline operates in
CodePage 437, and the text box operates in CP 1252. But I'm not convinced that
that dissimilarity would cause flicker (whatever "flicker" really means or
looks like). I read some of the NB flicker msgs, and it seems like a classic
NB muddle, people all talking about different things. _You_ specifically said
that flicker affected only the line or two around the cursor; other people made
it sound like a textbook case of *real* screen horizontal refresh rate
adjustment. For the problem you saw, I would first increase the amount of
visible space ("leading") between lines. You can accomplish this several ways:
increase the font size, or the zoom factor, or maybe set AutoLeading AL=1 (if
AL still has any meaning in NBWin). That's just a guess, based on a similar
problem in Xy4-DOS graphic mode: when two lines are so close together that
they overprint on-screen, you see strange video artifacts. If you're operating
by default in Draft mode, remember that there's a new DraftModeFONT immediate
command, DMFONT, that allows you to use a different (e.g. larger) monospaced
font in eXPanded, Draft, and Page-Line modes. A second "feature" of NBWin is
that it substitutes little yellow internal glyphs for low-order characters like
Ascii-0, 9, 10, and 13. Certainly that's a video feat by NB, but I'd be
surprised if it caused flicker.

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