Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!cs.utexas.edu!usc!bbn!bbn.com!slackey
From: slackey@bbn.com (Stan Lackey)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.8bit
Subject: Re: XEP80's
Message-ID: <52710@bbn.COM>
Date: 27 Feb 90 15:56:00 GMT
References: <297@pallas.athenanet.com> <27134@cup.portal.com> <52430@bbn.COM> <27342@cup.portal.com>
Sender: news@bbn.COM
Reply-To: slackey@BBN.COM (Stan Lackey)
Organization: Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc., Cambridge MA
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In article <27342@cup.portal.com> Metalist@cup.portal.com (Bryan Jones Woodworth) writes:
>- Can the XEP80 display crisp 80 column text on a 13" color TV?

Not normally. Regular TV's don't have the bandwidth.  Some say a good
B&W can be used, but I haven't tried; there's no place to plug in the
[unmodulated] composite video signal on mine. :-)

Now I use both a "mid-res" color monitor and a hi-res mono; the color for
games, and the mono for development.  The mid-res has composite and TTL
input. When I attempted to use the mid-res for the XEP, it resulted in
bad overscan; apparently, real monitors have a different scan setup or
picture size or something.

>- Can the XEP80 display ATASCII graphics (the ATASCII character set)
>On a mono/amber screen monitor? 

Yes. The XEP has the ATASCII character set (in ROM I assume) internally.
It supports reverse video as well.  I wonder if it is possible to write
the character ROM (that is, put a new character set on RAM and point the
internal processor to it, like you do in the Atari).

>(Or if I were using an XEP80 with a  mono
>monitor, would I need to use ASCII translation when modeming?)

I don't know.  I have never used a modem on an Atari.  It seems to me
though that a modem program that uses software 80 col would need to be
changed to simply write characters to E:.

>- There is a PD 80 column driver I am sure you have seen that sets up 80
>columns o the screen. But this won't work with, say, BOBTERMwill it?  Upon
>loading of BOBTERM wouldn't the 80column
>handler cause some sort of crash??

I believe the software-only 80 col emulators set up the screen in
bitmap (graphics 8 in BASIC-talk) and do blts to form characters in a
4x8 cell.  I never had a tube good enough to display this kind of
resolution, including the mid-res one.  You might not get a crash; I
suspect you'd get a blank screen, because the XEP driver turns off the
graphics chip.
-Stan