exxos's Atari, Amiga & retro forum

exxos wrote: 24 Sep 2018 17:48 If we can enable Hi res in desktop menu,

@Troed can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it (with MoCo) it’s not possible to do this if any GEM functions (for instance file dialogue) are called since (and I’m pretty much making up words as I go in lack of knowledge) one can’t reinitialize something-something in GEM when switching between lo/hi.

ube wrote: 25 Sep 2018 21:22

exxos wrote: 24 Sep 2018 17:48 If we can enable Hi res in desktop menu,

@Troed can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it (with MoCo) it’s not possible to do this if any GEM functions (for instance file dialogue) are called since (and I’m pretty much making up words as I go in lack of knowledge) one can’t reinitialize something-something in GEM when switching between lo/hi.

AFAIK, the only way to switch to mono is with a reset, so if it was enabled in the desktop menu, the machine would also have to issue a reset and reboot..

ube wrote: 25 Sep 2018 21:22

exxos wrote: 24 Sep 2018 17:48 If we can enable Hi res in desktop menu,

@Troed can correct me if I’m wrong, but as I remember it (with MoCo) it’s not possible to do this if any GEM functions (for instance file dialogue) are called since (and I’m pretty much making up words as I go in lack of knowledge) one can’t reinitialize something-something in GEM when switching between lo/hi.

Yeah the VDI does not handle going from low/mid to high and back nicely*. It might be possible to reload the resources in a nice way without reset but it would need to be something built on the available TOS 2.06 sources (or just making use of the Falcon-TOS 4.x hybrid for ST that's been also done from source)

The latter I'm very interested in to make use of for supporting the new exotic video modes as well.

(As to your design exxos - looking good - but for soft switching between the "mono" resolutions and color we'd need to decode ff8260/1 and trigger the mono_detect as well)

*) MoCo came some way towards fixing this, at least stopping things from crashing, but I ran out of time spent on that project ...

troed wrote: 25 Sep 2018 21:26 (As to your design exxos - looking good - but for soft switching between the "mono" resolutions and color we'd need to decode ff8260/1 and trigger the mono_detect as well)

That should be simple enough to do once we have some large PLD's in the mix..

For what it's worth, I'd like it to use a VGA connector and a simple rgb/mono toggle switch to mount somewhere on the back of the case. A thing I really don't like about UBE is it likes to switch modes on every reboot. And any fancy software mode switch is going to be a waste of time.

KyleB wrote: 27 Sep 2018 22:00 For what it's worth, I'd like it to use a VGA connector and a simple rgb/mono toggle switch to mount somewhere on the back of the case. A thing I really don't like about UBE is it likes to switch modes on every reboot. And any fancy software mode switch is going to be a waste of time.

Just for the sake of completeness: The ube can store one setting permanently with a long button press.

As there isn't a RF port, there's actually a space for a VGA connector. This way original cases could still be used and modified for VGA. I'd like to keep the RGB port, my TV doesn't have VGA input, so its useless for me. Though I think having VGA as well is the best of both worlds.

As said before, will need a mono switch of some kind. If a mono monitor is plugged in the RGB port, it will switch to mono like normal. If there is no mono input, such as VGA connected, then it really needs to be switched in GEM in the menu. Of course it can have a physical switch to constant force mono if needs be.

One thing to bare in mind, is ultimately I want to add NVRAM RTC like on Falcon. So such settings will be stored internally anyway.