Flat screen monitors don't fill screen

[Mike Doty]

Had a call today that Gateway 15-inch flat screen
monitors do not allow DOS programs to fill the screen.
Anyone have a solution (other than don't buy one?)

[Eric Pearson]

Do you mean that they don't support an 80x25 text display? I'd be astonished if that was true, since all Intel CPUs use that screen mode during boot-up.

What happens when you try to switch modes? Does it simply fail or do you see some kind of message, or...?

Hmmm... Maybe you have to use a special video driver to use the monitor with Windows, and maybe it doesn't support 80x25?

-- Eric


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Perfect Sync: Perfect Sync Development Tools
Email: mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Mike Doty]

Eric,
I had a call on this this morning. The user says
that when in full screen mode about 70% of the monitor
is filled. The largest window size is 2/3 of the screen.
I don't have one of these monitors, but may go to a
Gateway store here in Omaha to see for myself.
I'm curious if their monitor just needs to be aligned.



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[Eric Pearson]

Is that what the screen looks like during boot-up? If so, that may just be the way their text-mode screen looks. I assume that the surrounding screen area is blank?

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Perfect Sync: Perfect Sync Development Tools
Email: mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Mike Doty]

No adjustments on the monitor. The user is now in
contact with Gateway and will be getting back to me.



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[Tom Hanlin]

Unlike CRTs, LCD displays have a fixed number of pixels available, so the display resolution is not malleable. In order to maintain a proper aspect ratio and keep a clean-looking display, it's not uncommon for an LCD display to use different amounts of screen space to emulate different display resolutions. This is an inherent limitation of the technology.

It may be possible to find a driver that will use the entire display size by "stretching" the image. The fact that this is not the default behavior strongly suggests that the result wouldn't stretch evenly, producing unacceptable display quality.

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Tom Hanlin
PowerBASIC Staff

[Mike Doty]

Sort of reminds me of when I bought a DVD player
and discovered that most movies are picture box.

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[Aldo Vitagliano]

I have exactly the opposite problem !
On my notebook (EXTENSA 368T, LCD 800x600 pixels)
I would like to see a reduced DOS window (640x480) in full-screen mode, and I cannot.
The window is scaled to full-size, and in graphic mode (SCREEN 12)
a single logic pixel can become anything from one to four physical pixels.
So the image is quite bad.
Does anyone know of drivers fixing this problem ? My vendor was not able to solve it.

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Aldo Vitagliano
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Lance Edmonds]

Use an external CRT (conventional) monitor? As Tom said, LCD/matrix technology has it limits and can not be all things to all people.


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Lance
PowerBASIC Support
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[Aldo Vitagliano]

Perhaps I can propose to exchange my monitor for the Gateway one ! ....
Being serious, since both kinds of functionality are clearly possible, it should be easy to design a LCD driver
which gives to the user the option of either (a) scale a 640x480 logical screen to the full physical pixel size of the monitor
or (b) let the 640x480 logical size fill a 640x480 physical size, using only part of the screen area.
It is a problem of software, not hardware.
Does anyone know of notebooks/drivers having this option ?


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Aldo Vitagliano
mailto:[email protected][email protected]</A>

[John Krahn]

On both my laptops (IBM and Toshiba) the physical screen is 800x600 and there is a BIOS setting to run DOS text as full screen or use only 640x480 pixels in the center. Maybe Gateway also has a setting in the BIOS?

John


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