wales@valeria.cs.ucla.edu (Rich Wales) (03/23/91)
If you have a VGA display and use text modes larger than 80x25, be aware of a problem with the recently posted "Inner Mission" screen saver. If Inner Mission starts running its "star" display -- and you stop it by hitting either "shift" key -- your display will be set to 80x25, regard- less of what it was before. I found this, to my chagrin, while using Telix (a terminal emulator) in 80x50 mode. I left for a while, and when I came back Inner Mission was doing its "thing" to save my screen. Neat, I thought. But when I hit "shift", my display ended up in 80x25 mode, and I had to reset it to 50- line mode manually (losing the current screenful in the process). I mentioned this to the author (Kevin Stokes, kds@physics.phy.duke.edu). He acknowledges this behavior, but is unwilling to fix it at present because (1) it would require the program -- a TSR -- to use about 4K more RAM, and (2) he doesn't consider the fix worth his time in terms of the number of extra registrations it would get him above and beyond what he's already getting. Mr. Stokes did indicate that he might consider fixing this problem if enough people asked him to. Too bad. Inner Mission is the nicest screen saver I've seen so far -- but since I spend so much time every day in my terminal emulator, there is flatly no way I can justify spending even $5 on a program that's going to mess up my screen like this. I suppose I might try running Inner Mission with the "-W" flag, which disables the "star" display (and just blanks the screen instead) except when the computer is in the DOS wait-for-key loop. But this isn't too much more appealing than the "blanking" screen saver I already have. -- Rich Wales <wales@CS.UCLA.EDU> // UCLA Computer Science Department 3531 Boelter Hall // Los Angeles, CA 90024-1596 // +1 (213) 825-5683