[comp.sys.zenith] <CTL><ALT><I> = Interlaced?

dent@unocss.unomaha.edu (dent) (03/23/90)

I have a Zenith 158, with a CGA monitor... Yesterday I installed a TSR
program but didn't know what the "hot key" was, so I was pressing ctl-alt-
everything (but not <Ins> or <Del> of course :-) to try to figure it out.

Eventually I stumbled across <Ctl><Alt><I>, which apparently threw the
monitor into Interlaced mode.  The characters all shrunk to half-height,
and took up only the top half of the screen.  It turns out that <Ctl><Alt><N>
brings the screen back to "normal" mode.

I tried to duplicate this on a friend's machine, but his Z-158 has an EGA
card in it, and didn't do it anyway.  Has anyone else run across this, or
better still, know why it's in there?  Is there any way to get 50 lines
of text in this "interlaced" mode (not for long without getting a headache
from the flickering, of course)?

-/ Dave Caplinger /---------------------------------------------------------
 Microcomputer Specialist,   Campus Computing,   Univ. of Nebraska at Omaha
 dent@zeus.unomaha.edu         ...!uunet!unocss!dent            DENT@UNOMA1

bobmon@iuvax.cs.indiana.edu (RAMontante) (03/26/90)

I saw this documented somewhere ... *once* ...  It works for me, even when
I'm using FANSI-Console, but I never found any particular use for it.

Microemacs (the one that's at about version 3.10) can be compiled to
take advantage of this mode, but the result isn't all that readable on a
CGA monitor.  I suppose that sufficiently un-clever software could use
the full screen, as long as it acts as though it's writing to a line
printer.

Personally I think that feature is one of those charming idiosyncracies
of the z-158 that will eventually just disappear from the universe because
it's too oddball.  (Sort of like the entire z-100, a real nice machine
that is doomed to eventual oblivion.)  I'm dreaming of a cheapo VGA upgrade,
or else of a Sun SPARCstation with GTX card.