On 8/8/06, Dieter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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 agree that this is a problem, but what system is going to handle this? Probably very little since the original IBM PC will handle 40x25. Most things are going to expect 80 columns, and few will likely handle more than 80 either. I bet the BIOS boot screens expect very specific properties and won't handle anything else.
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.
I think we're going to have to try to address this later, if at all. OGD1 will be the basis for our products for a number of months, so nothing is etched in stone (or silicon). What's worse about TV in general is that, with a 3.57MHz subcarrier for color, you cannot get more than 160 columns of color on the display (based on 640, assuming 1:1 from the viewable 480 scanlines, with a horizontal total of 704). Moreover, although the luma is analog, most TVs blur the heck out of it, bringing the usable resolution down to something between 160 and 320. So, basically, your resolution on the display is roughly half the width of a character. The only recourse we have is to design a really clever font, and even then, it'll still be just about useless. We could, perhaps, implement some sort of panning, but how do you indicate to the card the viewport? _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
