SVGA EMULATOR V1.0 A New Core production. Based on the demo version of BlowUP030 by Georg Acher & Michael Eberl ----------------------------------------------------- This program is public domain and may be copied and passed to others for free, but please remember to copy this textfile as well! WARNING! This program is intended to run on an ATARI Falcon030 computer with a SVGA monitor connected. IF YOU HAVE A STANDARD VGA MONITOR IT MIGHT BE DESTROYED! The Author takes no responsibility whatsoever for any harm, damage or inconvenience caused by the use or missuse of this program. HOW TO USE THE SVGA EMULATOR To take out the best of your SVGA monitor the SVGA EMULATOR boosts the resolution of your Falcon030 to 864x512 pixels in 16 color mode. This is the highest noninterlaced resolution that both the F030 and a fixed frequensy SVGA monitor can handle. (The F030 can handle higher resolutions that a SVGA monitor cannot handle. And vice versa.) Simply put the SVGA EMULATOR in the AUTO folder and reboot. If the desktop doesn't appear in 864x512 resolution, select "Set video" and then set 16 colors, 80 columns and line doubling OFF. You can also set 16 colors, 80 columns and line doubling ON. This will NOT cause line doubling, but the font that is normally used for line doubling modes is used. Because this font is smaller the screen area will appear to be larger. This can be useful if you need to have alot of text on screen. All other screen modes including the compatibility modes will work as they used to. And you can change between them as you always do. You can prevent the SVGA EMULATOR from being installed by holding both SHIFT keys pressed down during boot up. TECHNICAL NOTES The SVGA EMULATOR is basically a patched, bugfixed and optimised version of the demo version of BlowUP030. The greatest improvements over BlowUP030 are: The SVGA EMULATOR handles Setscreen() properly. BlowUP030 doesn't always reinitialize VDI which cause the screen to be corrupted if you do: { WORD mode; mode=Vsetmode(-1); Setscreen(-1,-1,0); Setscreen(-1,-1,3,mode); } The SVGA EMULATOR can handle all three compatibility modes. Sometimes the demo version of BlowUP030 hangs if you try to switch to compatibility mode. The SVGA EMULATOR avoids this problem by checking for double pixel mode in the v_opnwk() code. For programmers extended resolutions have been somewhat a pain in the ass. With the SVGA EMULATOR it's possible to find out if the current resolution is extended. If you call Vsetmode() and bit 14 is set in the return value the resolution is extended otherwise it's not. BlowUP030 uses both bit 14 and bit 15 in some mysterious way which I think is really stupid! (Using bit 15 might fool programs that Vsetmode() has returned an error code!) You can find out if the SVGA EMULATOR is installed by checking for "SVGA" in the cookie jar. The string "SVGA" is also used as XBRA identifier. NEW CORE - Coding for fame!