boegehol@delos.stgt.sub.org (Harald Boegeholz) (10/01/90)
I accidentally discovered an undocumented feature of the MODE command that I think may be interesting to some people on the net. With MODE CO80,x it is possible to switch to a video mode with x lines and 80 columns. The OS/2 Online-Manual says that legal values for x can be 25,43, and 50, depending on the installed video adapter. On an IBM PS/2 Model 60 running IBM OS/2 EE 1.2, I discovered that in a full screen session a lot of other values are also accepted and special video modes are set accordingly. I tried all numbers between 1 and 70 and came up with the following list of numbers that worked: 12, 14, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60. In the DOS-Box, I discovered that the following numbers worked: 12, 14, 21, 25, 28, 43, 50. Strange, isn't it? Maybe someone can explain why exactly these numbers work... Btw, in a VIO-window, any value between 1 and 102 is accepted. Maybe someone with an EGA adapter should give it a try too and let us know the results? I hope this was news to you after all... Harald Boegeholz (boegehol@delos.stgt.sub.org)
Conrad.Bullock@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Conrad Bullock) (10/02/90)
In article <2657@delos.stgt.sub.org> boegehol@delos.stgt.sub.org (Harald Boegeholz) writes: >I accidentally discovered an undocumented feature of the MODE command >that I think may be interesting to some people on the net. >12, 14, 21, 23, 24, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, >47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60. I discovered the same thing a few weeks back. Not only that, but a lot of those will also let you have 40 columns - Try MODE CO40,12 - really wacky! I'm pretty sure that in the version that I'm using, the DOS Box lets you have most (but not all) of those values - I think the missing ones are basically 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59 >Strange, isn't it? Maybe someone can explain why exactly these numbers >work... On a VGA adapter, the text mode can be set to 200, 350, 400, or 480 scan lines, and the font used can be 8, 14, or 16 scan lines per character. So 12 lines per screen is 200 scanlines, 16 line font, and so on. My favourite mode is 34 lines - that is the maximum number of lines possible before it switches down to an 8 scanline font - the 14 line font is very readable. Incidentally, OS/2 Brief will set the number of lines to any of the above numbers, by putting -L??, where ?? is the number of lines, on the command line, or in the environment variable. Another 'undocumented' feature of OS/2 V1.2 that I only recently discovered, is that it has proper unix wildcarding - for example, you can dir *NW*, or dir *fg*ty.txt, etc. >Harald Boegeholz (boegehol@delos.stgt.sub.org) -- Conrad Bullock | Domain: conrad@comp.vuw.ac.nz Victoria University of Wellington, | or: conrad@actrix.co.nz New Zealand. | Fidonet: 3:771/160 | BBS: The Cave BBS +64 4 643429