RevMedia

With the advent of more sophisticated video control (with 43 and 50 line support) and with yet more sophistication to come (with the rumoured 132 column support) it is instructive to examine the system routines and control records provided for the manipulation of the video screen. One thing that it is timeous to point out is that whilst some of these routines (such as VCARD) provide information that is accessible elsewhere, the use of calls to standardised routines (such as GET_VID_INFO) is encouraged by RevTI as it permits the construction of software "black boxes" which can be radically changed on the inside without changing the result returned to the calling program.

VIDEOCONFIG

There is a record in the SYSTEM file which contains the setup information required when configuring the video mode. It has five multi-valued fields as follows

     < 1 >     Video Mode - this is the numeric value used by VIDCTRL (q.v.)
               when resetting the video mode.
     < 2 >     Description of the video mode
     < 3 >     Screen width in this mode
     < 4 >     Screen depth in this mode
     < 5 >     Type of card mode will work with. Setting a VGA card to an
               EGA mode and vice versa does not work. This value records the
               kind of video card (as returned by VCARD (q.v.) which the
               video mode is designed for.

VCARD

Called subroutine taking (and returning) one parameter, the kind of video card installed. Calling syntax is X = "" ; CALL VCARD(X). Types identified in Technical Bulletin 74 are, 0 - MDA, 1 - CGA, 2 - EGA, 3 - PGA, 4 - VGA, 5 - MCGA, 6 - Unknown.

GET_VID_INFO

This is a function taking one parameter - the branch, returning a result of the information being asked for. The branches and returned results are as follows

     1    Video mode
          0 Normal text mode
          1 25 line EGA Mode
          2 43 line EGA mode
          3 25 line VGA mode
          4 43 line VGA mode
          5 50 line VGA mode
          6 16 line VGA mode
     2    CRT Width
     3    CRT Height
     4    Video Card type - same as results of VCARD.
     5    Unknown - always returns 0 on test machine.
     6    Starting address of Video RAM, returned as a two byte number, in
          low byte high byte order. Normally this would return CHAR(0) :
          CHAR(184), in other words (0 + 256 * 184) = 47104=B800.

VIDCTRL

This assembler subroutine controls the video setting of the screen and can be used to "flip" modes in real time. It takes 5 parameters, of which only the first two and the last one seem to be used. As it is an assembler routine it is difficult to be able to state with any confidence exactly what all calls do, however there seem to be three major kinds of call, with each kind taking a specific action modifier. The calling sequence is therefore

where

     Action    Is the action to take, having the value of the video card
               type for modes 0 and 2, and the video mode to change to for
               mode 1.

     Mode      Is the type of operation to be performed 0  Reset video card
               to default settings
               1  Change video mode
               2  Possibly initialise card - does not seem to be required.

     UK        Unknown

     Flag      Result of operation.

Using this routine permits the programmer to reset the screen into an alternative video mode. Note that when this is done there are several caveats to be aware of :-

          Changing the screen size necessitates the changing of the status
          line location. This is done by resetting @CRTHIGH and @CRTMAXHIGH
          to the appropriate size and the calling the system routine
          INIT.STATUS.

          When video modes change, the screen is left blank. A background
          must therefore be filled in using Video.RW. In the code that
          follows the default background of \B01B\ is used. If you do not
          use the default and you wish to construct a generic routine,
          you will have to extract the correct settings from the
          environment.

          As mentioned in the discussion of VIDEOCONFIG, certain video modes
          do not work with certain video cards. The program following makes
          no allowance for this, but for genericism it could be coded to
          check the current video card against the requested mode by
          examining the VIDEOCONFIG record.

          As we wish to return to the normal status line when leaving the
          temporarily chosen mode, it is necessary to capture the screen
          image before the new mode is invoked, and restore this image
          upon return.

The code following represents a generic routine for calling a window from a menu and having that window appear in a non-default video mode. It may be called directly as a subroutine, or via catalyst using * to separate the arguments. The arguments are the window name and the mode to use. The mode can be the number or the text equivalent.