Re: [MiNT] vcons FAQ

[Steven Moore <smooreg@essex.ac.uk>]

>> This is true. You did most of the work for me. ;)
> I hope you're talking to Jurgen there. :)

Well, mostly, yeah. I stand on the shoulders of giants, sort of thing. Petr 
Stehlik's large VGA patches were a useful clue to where I ought to go (many of 
those have been replaced though <g>).

>> Tested, and works perfectly on my current (SVGA) monitor.
> Hmm, I derived the fact that it didn't from two things: 1. The comments
> in the source (I don't have it here but come to think of it, it was
> kinda open to double interpretation) :) 

I freely admit that I'm sh*te at writing docs. Anyone want to lend a hand, here?

> and 2. the fact that I didn't get any colors. :)

I rarely get colours. Get colours where? Many MiNT programs aren't compiled to 
use them... yet.

> Well I just freshly installed kgmd (had some nasty harddisc probs
> before) :) so no mixed versions there. And I tried all the different vcon* 
> instances. :) Is there anything else apart from the above I should do to see 
> the colors? Is tw52 the terminal to use?

No, you should use term=stv52, pretty much as is. (The termcap and terminfo 
badly need rewriting -- DO NOT install the supplied termcaps and terminfos, 
they could mess things up. I'm going to have to recover myself before I change 
that to something more likely to work). It may be helpful to add the colour 
codes and stuff to the termcap and terminfo entries, but I'm no expert on these 
formats - I had to nick the man page from Digital UNIX to even be able to 
figure it out at all... :)

Be sure to change /etc/rc.local to reference vconsd instead of vcons1d (if it 
really is a clean KGMD installation, that is). If you are running a Falcon, 
you'll then get an appropriate default resolution next time you boot up. Then, 
change to a resolution you'd like to use (say, 832x608, 4 planes) and run 
save_res.tos from the distribution; it will save a file named /etc/resolution. 
Then, restart. If you are in a colour resolution, it will be detected. The 
easiest way to find out if you're in colour? Go into sh, and enter the vt52 
colour codes directly. 

"<ESC>c4 This text has a blue background <ESC>c0" ought to cover it. (Watch the 
case of the ESC codes.) Remember, tcsh and the like do not echo escapes, use 
sh. Works for me.

Now all you have to do is find applications which use colour, and bask in the 
glory. I, for one, have heard of a colourful ls implementation. I'd like to see 
that, being able to tell file types apart even faster. Apparently, vim has some 
sort of colour structure support. That'd be good. Any other notables?

>> The only known bug is that ST-low will be incorrectly detected as having 2
>> planes, and not 4.
> Oh bugger. :) (j/k) :)

I may well fix it in passing, as it only need a quick 'if' statement, and I 
don't like having incorrect code - even if it will never get run. ;)

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