[comp.sys.atari.st] German mod to increase ST display size

ivan@rzsin.sin.ch (Ivan D. Reid) (05/09/89)

	I finally got my hands on a copy of the 5/89 'ST 68000er Magazin' last
night and struggled through the article on increasing the display size of the
ST screen.  It's a hardware kludge to keep the display enable (DE) signal to
the MMU and shifter chips active longer, thus displaying into the overscan on
all four sides.  It's just a simple little DTL circuit that only disables DE
when either HSync or Vsync are low, plus a switch to restore to the original
configuration when needed; a switch, a transistor, 2 resistors, 2 diodes and a
condensor, plus 3 wires and a cut in a PCB trace.  Apparently there are a
couple of other mods that might need to be made for very old STs. 
	There seems to be at least two versions of the software; one is a
GFA-Basic programme to modify "Ihre Original-Beta-TOS-Diskette"(!) so that
Beta-TOS comes up in the larger sized modes, and another to be put in the \AUTO
folder for use with ROM-TOS.  The latter is given as a type-in programme 2.8Kb
long, but they're both separately available on a diskette (DM30).  This
diskette is a bit amusing to me -- it also includes V1.25 of HiSoft's DevPac,
which has been superseded by V2.0.  Last month in England I bought a mag with
disk included, also with the DevPac, but they wanted 25 quid for the documen-
tation; 68000er printed 4 pages of documentation but wants DM30 for the
diskette!!!  So for the cost of two mags... 
	Anyway, next month 68000er will print more stuff on their
"Hyperscreen", including a list of programmes that work with it.  If I've made
any gross errors in the above, I hope one of our German-speaking correspondents
will correct me. 
		ivan

dac@ukc.ac.uk (David Clear) (05/11/89)

In article <250*ivan@rzsin.sin.ch> ivan@rzsin.sin.ch (Ivan D. Reid) writes:
>(a little)
>....  It's a hardware kludge to keep the display enable (DE) signal to
>the MMU and shifter chips active longer, thus displaying into the overscan on
>all four sides.
>(then lots more)

Has anyone tried this in the colour modes? I've seen demos where overscan is
achieved in software by playing with the 50/60Hz register, but uses up an
awful lot of time to do the side borders. Overscan in colour sounds very
interesting.

-- 
% cc life.c                      | David Clear <dac@ukc.ac.uk>
% a.out                          | Computer Science, University of Kent,
Segmentation fault (core dumped) | Canterbury, England.