> > Well, unfortunately, I don't think we have an overlay scaler like
> > you're thinking of.  However, we may be able to get the drawing
> > engine to do some sort of conversion that helps.
> 
> Well, we can use the palette to do the colourspace conversion, so then=20
> we would only need it to scale the result to fullscreen for=20
> fixed-frequency monitors. Dieter mentioned he'd like that.

If I understand your current conversation, it is about displaying
text, e.g. from the system firmware.  What I actually wrote was:

------ begin rerun ------
> Our video controller design doesn't provision for scaling.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but it looks to me like
you've gone from scaling to integer-only scaling to no scaling?

I would think that scaling isn't essential to dealing with the
firmware.  The firmware output needs to be readable, it doesn't
necessarily need to fill the display.

I do think that OGC would benefit greatly from scaling, but not for
talking to the firmware.

> However, if something asks for 640x480, but we need to do 1152x900, we
> could just put the lower res in the upper left corner of the display
> or something.

The center of the display would probably be better.  On CRTs the center
tends to have better focus, and if the display is a TV it is likely to
have overscan.

Which I guess leads to: are there systems whose firmware insists on
a resolution higher than 640x480?  What is the proper thing to do if
the firmware insists on a resolution higher than the actual display?
Hopefully this is a very rare case.
------ end rerun ------

Since then, I have remembered a problem with using a TV as a temporary
console.  A NTSC TV takes 720x480, but most TVs can't really resolve
that, and 80x25 text is likely to be unreadable.  IIRC, early personal
computers that used TVs as displays only output 40 chars or so per line.

I assume PAL and SECAM TVs have the same problem, just with slightly
different numbers.

Of course there are also lots of computer monitors that don't really
resolve what they claim to.
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