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Forum Index : Microcontroller and PC projects : PicoMite V6.01.00D release candidates
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| EDNEDN Senior Member  Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 265 |
You are very welcome. It was fun to write! That message is probably not valuable anymore and can be ignored. I'll double check that it can be removed and get rid of it for the next release. (And eliminate the confusion it caused.) That message is only complaining that the screen's (X,Y) dimensions are not big enough to support the debugger taking over the upper right corner of the screen. The 'D' version of PicoMite_v6.01.00RC??D firmware has the screen size defaulting to (145,45) instead of (80,24). Obviously, if MMBasic is going to support retro-hardware the (80,24) size used to make a lot of sense. That is what was mostly available back in the day. But with today's high resolution screens being used as an ASCII terminal by the user that limitation doesn't have much value anymore. Perhaps somebody can provide a reason why it still makes sense to have the (80,24) screen size be the default, and if so, the screen size could be adjusted higher (quietly!!!!) if the person invokes the debugger. If there are reasons to keep the default at (80,24) please explain the thinking! . Edited 2025-11-21 00:11 by EDNEDN |
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Mixtel90 Guru  Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8314 |
On a real VT100 the font is 8x9 pixels, giving a display of 53 lines of 80 characters on a 640x480 pixel screen. It may not be possible to generate this using the timing on the Picomite. The default of 80x24 was almost certainly chosen as it will display well on a TFT LCD display as well as a VGA monitor. Making the display width wider takes you out of the native width for most LCD displays so the display might be poor. Remember that you can't enter OPTION DISPLAY unless you can read the screen. :) Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| EDNEDN Senior Member Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 265 |
I was thinking the 80x24 size was chosen because that is what the old 'Glass CRT' screens were. I think that is what the old VT-52's were??? And of course that carried over into what the LCD panels were developed to handle. It is easy enough to just quietly set the screen size larger and not issue a caution message. Probably that is what makes sense. And RC18 just showed up... So that will provide an opportunity to resolve this. |
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| Mixtel90 Guru Joined: 05/10/2019 Location: United KingdomPosts: 8314 |
Strictly speaking the line length was 79 characters followed by a CR character. However, by using them carefully you could display 80. :) We had no VGA monitor for the Picomite at first. Only LCD. 640x480 became "the high resolution VGA standard" by virtue of the IBM PC, so I suppose it was a good one to copy. After that you get the characters per line and number of lines decided by what timings you can accommodate. The VT100 used 53 lines of 9 pixel high character cells to get 477 rows of pixels, losing the other 3 rows. The characters were 7 pixels high, plus two rows either blank or for descenders, which touched the row below. Mick Zilog Inside! nascom.info for Nascom & Gemini Preliminary MMBasic docs & my PCB designs |
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| EDNEDN Senior Member Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 265 |
PicoMite V6.01.00RC18D Built using PicoMite V6.01.00RC18 with the code updated to silently deal with improper screen size options. PicoMite_v6.01.00RC18D---Documentation.zip PicoMiteV6.01.00RC18D---Firmware.zip . Edited 2025-11-21 04:01 by EDNEDN |
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| EDNEDN Senior Member Joined: 18/02/2023 Location: United StatesPosts: 265 |
PicoMite V6.01.00RC19D now available. Built using PicoMite V6.01.00RC19 with the new Regular Expression engine. PicoMite_v6.01.00RC19D---Documentation.zip PicoMite_v6.01.00RC19D---Firmware.zip . Edited 2025-11-22 04:06 by EDNEDN |
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