Back when I announced the availability of this in 2007, you may have given Ultrascreen100 a try on your Model 100, but set it aside because TEXT felt sluggish. Well, you might want to give it one more try.
A bit of back-story. Ever since the 1987 commercial release, Ultrascreen100 redrew the entire small-font screen on every change. For every character you typed, in addition to the normal memory shift TEXT does as you add characters (which by itself is expensive), Ultrascreen performed a full repaint. On real hardware that meant TEXT could not always keep up with a fast typist, and a lot of people (understandably) decided it was not for them. Version 1.2 of Ultrascreen100 fixes that at the root. When I was porting the M100 code over to the T200, the problem was a lot worse due to the now *massive* amount of bit-blitting required by repainting the larger screen size. As I just announced yesterday, I ended up re-writing it for Ultrascreen200 and posted a new version which allows TEXT to be actually usable. Well, I back-ported that rewrite to the original Model 100 version. (And the NEC version!) It now only repaints the characters that actually changed, instead of redrawing the whole screen every keystroke. The result is that TEXT now keeps up with your typing the way it always should have, and the old workaround, the TXTADD.BA appender, is essentially unnecessary now. There is a trade-off, of course. Because of the shadow buffer I now have to keep in memory, the program is a little larger and loads a bit lower in memory. In everyday use you will not notice, and TEXT finally feels the way it was meant to. So if sluggish TEXT caused you to walk away from Ultrascreen100, this release changes that story. Grab USC100_v1_2.ZIP and take it for a spin. Would love to know what you think. You can download Ultrascreen v1.2 for the Model 100 on this page <https://www.web8201.net/default.asp?content=/Files/body.asp%3Fname=Ultrascreen%20for%20the%20M100/T200/NEC%26url=Ultrascreen> on Web8201. Gary Weber www.web8201.com On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 7:10 PM Gary Weber <[email protected]> wrote: > Do you care to see a 60x10 display on your Model 100's screen whenever > you're in BASIC, TEXT, or TELCOM? Well guess what, you're only one small > download from that becoming a reality. > > Ultrascreen100 is hereby released to the public for free distribution, as > of > November 23, 2007. Many thanks to Daniel Born (the author) and Richard > Eckerlin (Ultrasoft) for allowing this to become a reality: > > > http://www.club100.org/memfiles/index.php?&direction=0&order=&directory=Gary%20Weber > > Enjoy, > > Gary Weber > www.web8201.com > > >
