Re: Re Tame 5.7 etc

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Paul Breeze wrote:
> I've never had to make any allowance before. I run XY4 under Windows
> 2000 and if I want 28 lines I set d sl=-28 and set 28 lines in the
> shortcut properties. Similarly with 43 lines and 50 lines. That works
> fine for me every time.
That is truly strange. The CG itself says that one will get three
lines fewer than the designated SL, because of those top three
lines.
I've never bothered tweaking the screen length, since I need so
large a font that I assumed that would shorten the screen
regardless. But since the question came up here, I've been
experimenting, and the actual length seems to vary from PC to PC,
in a way that makes me think VGA BIOS is heavily involved. Recall
that Xy was written when VGA--basic 640X480 VGA--was the latest
thing.

Here is what Robert said, back in Dec. 2003:
Here's my take, FWIW: XyWrite thinks it is a VGA program (or
worse: EGA, CGA, Hercules, Mono -- depends on the setting of
GraphicsAdapter VAariable GA -- VG is the highest quality it can
handle, 640x480). Clearly, it _tells_ the operating system that
it is displaying in VGA. VGA in the BIOS was, and may still be,
limited to certain lines (25, 28, 34 [sometimes], 43, 50, 60
[sometimes]) and columns (40,80,132) -- maybe some other options,
I forget. You can't just get any old configuration you want --
although some video adapters may be more flexible, I dunno. Your
report that when you ask for 80 x 40, you actually get that when
you shell to DOS, but you're stuck with 80 x 43 when you run
XyWrite, is indicative of this.
See also his post of Jan. 9. 2006, in which he reminds us that
when you right-click on the titlebar of a running DOS app
(running in a window), there are _two_ places where screen length
is displayd: Defaults and Properties. One should check/change BOTH.
And forget the right-click on the desktop shortcut procedure: it
hasn't had any effect on anything but (maybe?) memory since
W2k-and no longer governs even that in Vista. Titlebar is the
place to go.
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx