PRINT / PRINT #6 - Vertical Boundary

[+MrFish]

Is there an easy way to modify the vertical boundary used by PRINT and PRINT #6 commands in BASIC/TBXL to accept values greater than what the standard Graphics modes use? I'm working with display lists that have been modified for more vertical lines.

 

[Rybags]

Not really in normal circumstances.  The cursor limitations are table based within the OS and annoyingly the text window can only be 4 characters high.

I tried getting around it back in the day but at best experienced glitches.

 

But workarounds available - regardless of text window or not the main area will always have the full screen height allocated and accessable even though it's normally invisible if you have the text window.

So in the case of doing a character main mode with text window you could do a custom DList which puts those other 32 scanlines worth somewhere else.

In the case of text mode it'll usually be a near match - e.g. if the main is 40 character mode but 20 character at the bottom you could in theory have 8 lines worth then addressing it would see characters 0-19 on one line, 20-39 on the next.

 

Another alternative can be to just alter the screen memory pointers used by the OS for the main or text window to access extra data.  In that case you just need to be careful when doing stuff like clear screen as it might overrun.  But an alternative can be just PLOT/DRAWTO to clear areas which can be used in text modes in S:

[+MrFish]

That's what I figured the case was. Not really a big deal, I can just convert to screen codes. The stuff I'm printing is no more than 8 characters per string anyway (and usually much less than that). It'll be plenty fast enough.

 

The display I'm using is 18x Antic 4 + 8x Antic 2 (with 4 blanks inserted in between), which is just barely over.