Questions tagged [display]
For questions regarding the display formats of retrocomputers.
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Physical server with LED display on case, possibly programmable
Sometime in the 2000s I was in the server room of a customer site. This was still in the days of largely on-premise, not necessarily rack-mounted server boxes. A guy from their hardware vendor was ...
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Why was the SNES color gamut RGB?
The SNES color gamut is 15-bit RGB. On the face of it, that makes sense for a 16-bit machine.
But.
The color generators on some earlier machines like the Atari 2600, Commodore 64, NES, were not ...
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Why did older computers and OSes use UPPER case instead of lower case?
Memory constraints in ye olden days meant that text-mode display adapters had room for either upper or lower case, but not both. Why was this universally uppercase and never lowercase?
I remember ...
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Was there a notable mainstream 640×480 monochrome display for PC earlier than MCGA
On IBM PC compatibles, the first widely-known display subsystems capable of displaying 640×480 pixels (resulting in square pixels with a 4:3 display) were the MCGA and VGA in 1987. By then, 640×400 ...
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RGBI direct connection to VGA display
Theoretically, if I would wire my CGA card output to a proper display using R,G,B,Hsync,Vsync,Ground lines only, I should see something sensible on the screen. I would lose Intesity information, all '...
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Need help with my Compaq Presario cm0900
First off, this is something that has been troubling me for quite a while because I am dealing with a pretty rare machine. I looked up this specific model but the computers I found were either from ...
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What did Windows 2 do about varying aspect ratio?
There was a time when computer graphics had to deal with non-square pixels. Happily that time ended once everyone had VGA or better.
But Windows 2 supported both EGA and VGA. And while the latter has ...
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Eventual garbage screen on Commodore PET 2001N
I have a Commodore PET 2001N 32K that boots and runs fine but eventually (sometimes minutes, sometimes hours) it goes to a garbage screen, and it will stay that way if I immediately cycle the power. ...
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What did game programmers and journalists mean by a "hardware trick"? [closed]
Recently, I've been hearing a good deal about hardware tricks. For instance, the YouTuber Ahoy (see A Brief History of Graphics) mentions that some game programmers resorted to "hardware tricks&...
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Was there ever a monospace display system (eg terminal) that used a vertical cursor?
Related to my earlier question about IBM PC cursors, I am now wondering if there has ever been a monospaced character display system (such as a terminal) that would've implemented a vertical cursor in ...
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Why did IBM PC have horizontal cursor instead of vertical or block cursor?
Most 8 bit machines, like C-64, seem to have block cursors, while modern user interfaces often have vertical cursors. PC has horizontal cursor of two (or 3) scanlines by default, and block cursor for ...
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How to change graphics modes from BASIC on a Timex/Sinclair 2068?
I've got the Timex/Sinclair 2068 emulation working under MAME and wanted to play with its extra graphics modes the original version of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum didn't have.
But despite an hour of ...
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What is the size of the border of the ZX Spectrum in scanlines/pixels/bytes?
The bitmap area of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum is exactly 256 x 192 pixels.
Surrounding the bitmap is quite a wide border area which is generally just one colour but loading and saving from tape changes ...
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Was there a system with customarily backspaced prompts?
Nowadays, a default prompt in a Unix shell might look like % _ or $ _ (with the underscore indicating the cursor location), or, on other systems, a more elaborate string, like C:\>_.
On the besm-6, ...
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Were there any square monitors other than PLATO?
The PLATO multiuser interactive computer system used – and indeed invented for this purpose – a plasma display, whose key selling point in the late sixties was that it did not need refresh, therefore ...
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