Subj : Re: Commodore history - The Commodore 128 by The 8-Bit Guy
To   : Martijn van Buul
From : Andreas Kohlbach
Date : Fri Oct 19 2018 04:24 pm

On Fri, 19 Oct 2018 08:51:09 -0000 (UTC), Martijn van Buul wrote:
>
> * Andreas Kohlbach:
>> On 17 Oct 2018 21:05:34 GMT, Etienne von Wettingfeld wrote:
>
>>> It has an Assembler monitor, but I think Lucifer means two screens at once.
>>>
>>> It actually can, one using the 40 collumn mode and one the 80 character 
one.
>>
>> But not at the same time AFAIK. When you switch the mode the content what
>> was displayed in the mode before just froze on the other display.
>
> Well, that depends on your point of view. There are a few gotchas:
>
> The 40 column screen used a video chip closely related to the one in the
> C64. As such, it could only operate on 1MHz - if you wanted to use the
> 128's higher clockspeed (a blazing fast 2MHz), you were forced to blank
> the 40 colum screen and use the 80 column screen instead (as it used a
> separate video chip which didn't have this limitation).
>
> So it did make sense to disable the 40 column screen, if the user switched
> over to 80. This is assuming that the user didn't really have 2 monitors
> to begin with, but only switched input source on their monitor - the 40
> column output would go to waste anyway.
>
> But that doesn't mean it couldn't be done to have both outputs active. In
> fact, it was quite normal for software development.
>
> A random demo I found on the interwebs:
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2dcqkM-jeM

Thanks for the information.

I was watching a video on Youtube a while ago where the presenter showed
how the 40 column froze when switching to 80 columns. I just took 20
minutes to find it but was unsuccessful.
--
Andreas

My random thoughts and comments
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