Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com