Re: NTSC Question / 6845 CRTC Registers

Jul 22, 2007 2 Replies


Aside from doing it the raw way, I also want to try using a 6845 I


> ordered last year to generate video. I think I've wrapped my head
> around how it works fairly well, but after looking at CGA register
> values, I found myself confused. It seems that if you're going to
> run
> in either 320x200 or 640x200 graphics modes, you don't set the number
> of vertically displayed rows to 200 as one might think, but 100
> instead. I don't understand this, or how the screen would then be
> displayed properly, since it seemingly is only doing half the screen.
> As far as I know, CGA doesn't ever interlace the actual screen,
> despite the graphics memory being laid out interlaced (which I'm sure
> is related to this somehow). If anyone can shed any light on this
> for
> me, I'd sure appreciate it!

Perhaps this pertains to something known as "Double Scan". I recall this from my early Linux days tinkering with XFree86 "ModeLine" statements.

Now i remember that part number. The issue is related to interlace and the fact that the vertical sync in not generated correctly by the 6845. So it "doubles" the odd scan to the even scan, doubling the line count.

JosephKK Gegen dummheit kampfen die Gotter Selbst, vergebens.   --Schiller

basically it's NTSC, many CGA cards had chroma and luma outputs. but at 200 usable lines it's not interlaced... I forget the details of why they do that...

scan doubling is a way to emit each line of pixels twice on VGA cards so that low resolution displays dont come out as a bunch of horizontal lines.

Bye. Jasen

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