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Comment by armitron | Hacker News Reader

Amiga could support multiple "desktops" with different resolutions at the same time. You could (partially or fully) expose a different desktop by dragging the titlebar at the top of the screen.

Here is a demo: https://youtu.be/H86miOXXS48?t=534

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Yeah, it's actually a hack that is well explained in the book "The Future was Here". It's not real desktops since it only works on the vertical axis. But even though, it was massively impressive compared to what other computers could do at the time.

It was a hack because it depended on the refresh cycle of old CRT displays. The electron gun scanned across each horizontal line from top to bottom. The video chip could use interrupts to switch resolution in the middle of the vertical refresh cycle. The same trick wouldn't work with a modern LCD display.

Only because of the inherent fixed resolution of the display - it would I think work if you had an Amiga with VGA out into an LCD display.

The native output resolution is the max vertical resolution of all currently displayed modes.

For instance, if you have an interlaced mode showing under a non-interlaced mode, then the entire screen displays at ~480i (to use modern terms) with the non-interlaced portion doubling its scanlines. But if the interlaced screen gets covered up, then it snaps to ~240p non-scandoubled.

The biggest modern problem with this is that displays turn themselves off to resync on mode changes, which always annoyed me greatly.

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