Super High Res

[Crumb]

Question about this mode (that is 1280x200.)  I've wondered if this mode is for real.  I can't tell since I don't have a monitor yet that works well with my 1200 but when I used the one monitor that seems to display 640x200 fairly well, I figured I'd try 1280x200.  So this mode looks like a ruddy mess and still reports 640x200 on the monitor.  

I read something somwhere about this mode being fast pixels or some such, but other than double-scan I can't imagine what this is.

If you use 16 colours it will be fast.

[Crumb]

Your monitor isn't capable of displaying 1280x200 and tries to make the best of it. It gets squished horizontally because the horizontal resolution is doubled and thus the size (not the resolution, just the physical size on screen) of icons and stuff is reduced by 50%.

In reality, 1280x200/256 is hardly ever used.

Quarter-pixel scrolling games benefit from this ability.

16 colours is faster than 256 because it requires less DMA channels so it doesn't block cpu (just like 31Khz screenmodes).

IIRC my cbm 1084sd2 accepted 73Hz screenmodes and also showed 1280x256 correctly (without skipping any column) but it's been a long time (and I also had an eyefish vision like cbm 1942). I remember clearly that my Arxxon scandoubler and my Picasso4 skipped columns in SHires mode so I guess my 2 old monitors didn't (although the text was too small for a 14" monitor so I prefered to use other screenmodes)

CompServ FlickerFixerII and IndivisionAGA 1200/4000/ECS show SuperHiRes correctly.

[Crumb]

Can you point to a single game that utilizes this mode? I am pretty sure there are none.

Its only practical use is for video titling software, some of which I know supported the mode.




bp

WORMS DC is the first one that comes to my mind, also Morton Strikes Back and Fantastic Dizzy AGA. I'm sure that there are more AGA versions that use quarter pixel scroll (but I'm not much into games, honestly)

But there's something that uses SuperHires everytime: scene demos with pseudo true color screenmodes. These use SuperHires HAM8 resolution to achieve an screen a quarter the width.

[Crumb]

That is because 1280x512 is so much better.

yeah! and SuperHiResLaced+Overscan is even more impressive with 1444x576 pixels :-)

As you have explained, SHiRes doesn't have any colour limitation but just like 31Khz screenmodes it requires more DMA channels to work and with 8 bitplanes it will be slower than 4 bitplane screens because cpu has less time to access chipram.

[Crumb]

I can see how most monitors are unlikely to support this.

I never found a 15khz monitor/TV that didn't support it.