Robert Holmgren wrote:
OK. I'm obliged to ask a really dumb question: You're
absolutely sure you were looking at *true* FullScreen VGA, and
not just a Window that was cleverly resized to fill the wholescreen?
Not dumb at all, especially to moi, whose perception of things
graphical is barely within the bounds of normal, and whose visual
memory is even worse. IF I'm remembering correctly, it was a REAL full
screen VDM: no taskbar, no title bar, no nothing. But I could be
wrong. And we certainly got there by hitting Alt-Enter. That I do
remember.
And because someFullScreen emulations can be really convincing --
it is possible
to hide the Title bar of a Window, and the borders can also be
hidden in the Registry or by simply enlarging the window beyond
the boundaries of the physical screen.
Fascinating. Because I rarely work in full screen, I've never even
thought about this much. Thanks for the info.
And finally because what you're saying is truly strange:
> why should resizing the DOS Window make any difference at
> all to the ability of the operating system to talk to the
> video card and set an SVGA mode?
It doesn't seem likely, does it? Except... Look, I'm probably
extrapolating excessively from certain experiences back in 286 days,
but back then, you recall, systems came with more RAM than DOS could
use. There were all sorts of kludges devised, many of them "sneaking
up" beyond the 640 K barrier, and using RAM that had been dedicated
to monochrome display adaptors but was no longer needed if you used a
color monitor. And recent experiments with setting Xy's memory
settings (in the pif properties, under 98SE) seem to show that there
is still some overlap or interrelation between video RAM and system
RAM when in DOS mode. I should think even more so if the system were
using shared video memory, as many systems do (integrated video on the
mobo, no separate VGA card; a bad idea, by the by: it inflicts an
awful hit on performance, even if you're not doing anything heavily
graphical). And I don't know what the setup on these boxes was; the
specs were, typically, not very informative.
Let me try to clarify what you're saying -- please correct me
where wrong. The salesman opened a DOS Prompt, right-clicked
Properties in the TitleBar, went to the Layout tab, and there
you see an image of your DOS Prompt window situated (and
positioned) within a larger black box intended to represent your
whole screen. To enlarge the representation of the DOS Prompt
window, he increased the "Window Size" until it filled the
larger black box.
Right, at least as far as I recall.
N.B.: Increasing the "Buffer Size" does nothing to alter either
of these representations, except to introduce sliders -- so I'm
thinking Buffer Size has nothing to do with this (?).
I certainly could be wrong (he went at it awfully fast), but I THINK
he was changing both sets of boxes.
The only
adjustment here, I imagine, is when you reach a full Window
Size, you would probably want to set Buffer Size to the samevalues...
He would have to *uncheck* "Let system position window" and set
the Left,Top coordinates to 0,0
Unfortunately, I cannot recall, and mayn't even have noticed at the
time, if he did or didn't. This guy had fingers of greased lightning.
And I was too far away to see the screen very clearly.
the Desktop (the Desktop, as I'm sure you know, is much larger
[roughly 4x] than the visible screen). In fact, you can push
both these numbers down to negative 4 -- I wonder if he did that?
Wow! NO, I didn't know that. Thanks for all this information. You
should write a book on this stuff.
The numbers in the Window Size box refer to columns ("Width")
and lines ("Height"). Therefore, these numbers are mightily
affected by the font size you have selected. What font size did
he use? Does it matter? Did he use Lucida Console TrueType, or
a raster font? Does it matter?
Again, sorry, I didn't see and couldn't recall if I had.
Is that what he wanted to do: reach exactly
these boundaries, but go no further?
As I cannot be sure of the details of what he did, I certainly don't
know what he wanted to do.
In fact, I would simply automate the whole
thing, including the Alt-Enter toggle, using GoXy.exe to poke
the (normally unscriptable Alt-Enter) keystrokes, with
parameters like this:
start /min GoXy.exe "DOS Window Title (whatever it is!)" /MODE
CON: COLS=183 LINES=81key(ETWT{1500}ALETWT{1500})MODE CON:
COLS=80 LINES=25key(ET)
WOW! again.
But here's what I'm wondering: If you set your Shortcut for
these very high column/line numbers, can you simply set the
Shortcut to open FullScreen -- does that just work?
I have no idea. Look, I'm going to print this out (and save it three
times over; very valuable info) and take it with me next time I go
near a computer store.
> is anyone else here using Vista?
Yes, please, chime in. Even when I get to a store, I will probably
have some solicitous sales clerk (and with my luck he WON'T be as
knowledgeable as speedy-fingers was) hovering over me. They don't,
thank heaven, suspect a little old lady of being a cracker, but they
do assume she's clueless and in need of "help"--which is too often
misinformation.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx