so01@dmarum8.BITNET (Thomas Neser) (01/05/90)
Hello back in the nineties, a few querstions for today: 1) Is is possible via soft- or hardware to kill the black frame of the atari sm124 monitor? 2) Is it posible to alter the waste paper basket of gem in the way that you can open it again like on the mac to unerase? 3) Can somone tell me where to find other computer newsgroups in the net and a few ideas: 1) The mouse cable can be repaired with little money. Ask your dealer to measure what doesn't work and then built a new one for of course 5 dollars 2) There is a german TEX running much faster than the pascal one cause it's in C. It's possible to run on a 1040er with only one drive, but for instalation you need two drives. Think it's enough for today, so let's say bye bye. If you know something of interest please email to so01@dmarum8.bitnet. Thanks in advance Thomas Neser
ripley@tubopal.UUCP (Hans-Ch. Eckert) (01/08/90)
In article <9001050802.AA10246@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> so01@dmarum8.BITNET (Thomas Neser) writes:
]2) Is it posible to alter the waste paper basket of gem in the way that
] you can open it again like on the mac to unerase?
Yse it is. A friend of mine has written a little accessory which does
this in a certain way. The way he wrote it it uses some undocumented
addresses, though. He doesn't have his ST any more, but I can ask him, if
he still have the source. I also might have a copy of it, but it only runs
on german TOS 1.0 (6-Feb-86)...
As long as you don't turn it on and delete somtehing, it doesn't crash
your computer also, which is at least better than most programs which
make illegal things...
]2) There is a german TEX running much faster than the pascal one cause
] it's in C. It's possible to run on a 1040er with only one drive, but
] for instalation you need two drives.
Are you talking of S.Lindner's shareware-TeX ? It's really great (I have
it up and running), but TeX is surely a pain without hd !
Greetings,
RIPLEY
--
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Regensburger Str. 2 | BITNET: ripley%tubopal@DB0TUI11.BITNET (saves $$$)hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (01/12/90)
In article <9001050802.AA10246@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> so01@dmarum8.BITNET (Thomas Neser) writes: >Hello back in the nineties, >a few querstions for today: >1) Is is possible via soft- or hardware to kill the black frame of the > atari sm124 monitor? By hardware you can open it up and tweak some potentiometers inside to expand the video image.. By software, probably the nicer way to go, you can get the OVERSCAN software and *use* that black frame for more pixels. 688x480 on a fresh-out-of-the-box SM124. -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!
matthews@umd5.umd.edu (Mike Matthews) (01/12/90)
In article <10616@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes: >By hardware you can open it up and tweak some potentiometers inside to >expand the video image.. By software, probably the nicer way to go, you >can get the OVERSCAN software and *use* that black frame for more pixels. >688x480 on a fresh-out-of-the-box SM124. > Two quick questions: 1) Where is this software? I can do anonymous ftp, so a site name would be muchly appreciated. 2) Do ST programs such as PageStream recognize this? Or, better yet (?), Spectre GCR? (hope my .signature file works this time)
pwp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Paul Purdom) (01/12/90)
Could someone say briefly what techniques the overscan software uses to do overscanning?
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (01/13/90)
In article <5929@umd5.umd.edu> matthews@umd5.umd.edu (Mike Matthews) writes: >In article <10616@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) writes: >>By hardware you can open it up and tweak some potentiometers inside to >>expand the video image.. By software, probably the nicer way to go, you >>can get the OVERSCAN software and *use* that black frame for more pixels. >>688x480 on a fresh-out-of-the-box SM124. >> >Two quick questions: > >1) Where is this software? I can do anonymous ftp, so a site name would be > muchly appreciated. > >2) Do ST programs such as PageStream recognize this? Or, better yet (?), > Spectre GCR? Sorry, I misspoke... You need to do some hacking to your ST motherboard as well, to use overscan. If you'd rather not do that, you're better off just tweaking the monitor. (It looks like a simple enough mod, though; cut one trace, add a couple wires and a [debounced!] toggle switch.) The software is available on terminator.cc.umich.edu. I don't have PageStream, dunno what it knows. I know that Uniterm doesn't like it very much. I wrote to Simon Poole, asking if he'd put out a new release that supports non-standard screen sizes. Got no reply, so I've disassembled it and fixed it myself. It's pretty cool now, 60 lines by 137 columns of text. How do you start up Spectre GCR? The Overscan program runs from the AUTO folder and tweaks some Line-A and other system variables. If you can boot TOS before you start up Spectre, you might have a chance. Otherwise I doubt it, but don't really know. If you wanted to make sure, you might be very enterprising and burn your own TOS ROMs with the Overscan mods applied... -- Howard -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!
hyc@math.lsa.umich.edu (Howard Chu) (01/13/90)
In article <32896@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu> pwp@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (Paul Purdom) writes: >Could someone say briefly what techniques the overscan software uses to do >overscanning? The hardware change is to cut the normal display enable signal (between GLUE and Shifter) and replace it with the composite sync signal. This allows you to actually display bits during the longer display enable cycle. The overscan software changes the physbase and logbase, among other things, to accomodate the larger display area. Unfortunately it's a little memory hungry with an SM124. Since the signal the ST is spitting out is now at a slightly greater bandwidth than the SM124 can accomodate, the effect is that the "top left corner" of screen memory cannot be displayed properly. The fix the overscan software uses is to add an offset between physbase and logbase. This pushes the region of memory that the ST actually draws on into a space that the SM124 can actually display. This causes problems for a lot of programs that do page flipping for screen drawing, animation, etc. They're typically set up to grab the value of physbase, malloc a 32K chunk for their alternate buffer, and toggle things in, swapping their original physbase and their new buffer in for logbase as they please. This makes for a lot of screen garbage when using overscan. [The original assumption, which is true on an unmodifed ST, is that physbase == logbase. WIth overscan, logbase >= physbase in order to position the screen appropriately. Thus, you can't swap them around at will, you have to remember the original values, etc.] I'm pretty sure the same sort of thing happens in color, but I haven't played with it as much. Fixing Uniterm required searching for every hardwired constant "24", "80", "132", "32000", etc., replacing them with appropriately calculated variables, rewriting the code that manipulates the screen memory, and finding weird little bugs caused by adding signed short integers to long addresses. [That last is No Fun.] I suspect that more programs will be incompatible than not. Another pitfall is programs that use the Line-A screen width variable analogously with the horizontal resolution variable. [On a plain ST, the screen width is 80 bytes, in monochrome you get 640 pixels. No problem, 8 pixels per byte. With overscan, you need 100 bytes per line, but you won't see 800 pixels on an SM124. You could with a multisync monitor, but not otherwise. So, you need to be careful, and some programs don't seem to take things into account very well.] This all seems quite tedious, since programs are supposed to let GEM worry about the nitty-gritty details of exact screen size. Some do, and they work fine. Unix Windows is a slick example of one that does. Others run into problems... Gee, this turned out a lot longer than I'd planned. Anyway, I'm rambling now, so I'll shut up. -- -=- PrayerMail: Send 100Mbits to holyghost@father.son[127.0.0.1] and You Too can have a Personal Electronic Relationship with God!