Switching to Amiga

[steve30]

Also, could someone please tell me how I can get the screenmode 'DblPAL Hires No Flicker'?

Effy told me to try this when he sent me my A1200 but I can't find the mode in the screenmode prefs in WB3.0.

I have a 1438 multiscan monitor. :-?

[pixie]

I think that's on one of WB3 disks devs/monitors

[steve30]

I will have to have a look for it.

I have only looked through Workbench3.0 and Extras3.0.

[benJamin]

I was thinking more about this as I was working away from my terminal...

If you go to, say, Amiga.org and hit the 'load all images' button, all the images will load while you read the news headlines.  Then, because you have soooo much RAM, all the images are cached and any that have already been downloaded and decoded are put straight into the page, and only 'new' images appear missing (when you browse down to other pages on the same site).  This will save your bandwidth and download limit (should you have one) for whatever else it is that people use their service for (I have a huge limit + off-peak on Cable, yet I only average 64-100Mb of downloads per month, so it doesn't bother me  :crazy: ),

Overscan - Well, on a TV, say, you can have graphics appear in the border so the display goes 'right to the edge'.  I think it had no effect to Workbench (the viewable area is the same as the maximum overscan size) on the VGA monitor I recently installed (there was no room on my desk for a VGA and 1084, so I begrudingly stopped playing 'Settlers' for a while).

The DblPAL and DblNTSC drivers should be in your 'Storage/Monitors' directory on the 'Extras:' disk (IMMSMC).

You can still have larger-than-display screens by setting the size larger than the viewable zone in the ScreenMode prefs, but I don't know if it works with all screen modes...


benJamin

"Looking for a replacement keyboard..."

[benJamin]

Use the overscan prefs to set the position and size of the rectangular areas.

As you can see from the crappy WinPaint picture, the graphics overscan should appear outside the frame of your monitor (this is for games).  Workbench uses the text overscan setting to ensure that all text appears inside this frame.

 :-D

benJamin


Well, I don't know if Sesame Street will ever be the same again.  I can't believe the Cookie Monster would ever claim that "Cookies are a sometimes food".  He's a monsters!  Monsters do uncooth things, like pretending to eat cookies whilst crushing them and liberally distributing them over the kid(s) standing next to him.

[steve30]

That makes sense now.

I will *aquire* the storage disk and look for dblpal.

[steve30]

Found DBLPAL. It's nice.

A little slow in 256 colours, but not much difference between that and my A500+ in 32.

[Hyperspeed]

Yeurgh!

DblPal is going to drain your ChipMem bandwidth like Multiscan productivity, you'll be crawling!

[steve30]

Seems to run OK in 32 colours. That's both VGA and dblpal hires. But that's only in workbench. Not tried any apps yet.

[Hyperspeed]

Your screen update will be arthritic, no... paraplegic.

Try NTSC in maximum overscan. You'll get a pseudo-widescreen viewable area, low 15KHz bandwidth needs and a smoothe 60Hz vertical refresh.

If you put NTSC into 640x480 you'd get a 4:3 screen ratio (this means pictures of people won't look fat or thin onscreen) and games/demos will swap to PAL 50Hz anyway.

60Hz is what console gamers choose nowadays, it might even be PAL 60Hz if your machine is UK.

[benJamin]

There are ways of making it a little more comfortable {crowbar.get()}:

I use the palette-locking tool recommended by VisualPrefs to lock in the 216 colour 'web palette'.  Select the low and high four colours (0-3 and 252-255) from this palette for your eight standard Workbench colours, and colours 16-19 for your mouse.  If you use certain images all the time, make sure they only use colours remapped from the 216 and optimise those colours to the lower-half of the palette (so that the higher-plains are zero-filled); this is good for background images that get redrawn frequently.  This should leave 40 colours free in the top-half of the palette for programs to get smoother gradients (like the colour wheel object, for example).

This will also improve the overall appearance of web pages as the spread of colours is more even, instead of ending up sepia-like after locking and unlocking various other colours and running out for future images.  This is good as most web colours will be picked by the colour allocator as they are close enough, and I find both jpegs and gifs remap quite well (especially if you use PPaint with FS remapping for static images).

I'm sure I could get the palette further optimised if I tried, but as soon as I found it acceptable, I stopped tweaking.

Moving large windows will always be like watching a house being built, but them's the breaks.

benJamin


It must be something in the air at my work, but I keep trying to spell 'palette' p-a-l-l-e-t, which is not what I want.

[steve30]

Thanks. I will try that.

My OS3.9, 3.1 roms, and ide splitter should be arriving soon.

Hopefully I should be able to use a 5 1/2 inch cd drive and laptop being powered from a pc power supply.

[steve30]

It all arrived last week!

I installed a spare laptop HD in my amiga today and installed WB3.1 on it (amiga is still CD-less).

It boots up in 6 seconds.

It's really fast and nice to use in Multiscan Productivety with maximum overscan. :-)