ABOUT YOUR HARDWARE =================== ABOUT MONITORS ============== The 1080 monitor that most of us are using is a pretty serviceable device and seems to have only the one drawback - the flicker that occurs in "Interlace" mode. Some have probably played around with it on Deluxe Paint (by entering > dpaint hi at boot-up) or, if you have the 1.2 software (see article this issue), you may have used Preferences to set the screen to Interlace. And most have probably decided that it's a bit too irritating and gone back to the normal medium-resolution 640*200 screen. However, it is useful in Word Processors such as Scribble! or in Communications programs, to use hi-res so as to see more text on the screen at once, and thereby reduce scrolling. It's also very useful for doing a lot of icon-swapping between two or three discs at once. REDUCING FLICKER A couple of useful tricks - firstly, as many know, you can fiddle with the colours on the Preferences screen to find a combination which doesn't contrast too strongly yet maintains good legibility. Just experiment by selecting colour combinations with the slider, and clicking on the front/back gadgets at the top right of the Preferences window to see the effect on your current screen - have your WP or ED in the CLI running. Secondly, just wear sunglasses - try it, it really does cut down on flicker. Thirdly, you can buy special screens to clip over the front of your screen which supposedly reduce flicker substantially. And you can run the program SETLACE from FISH DISK 9, or its recent update LACETOGL ( a lot smaller than its predecessor at only 248 bytes), which I believe actually fills up those tiny little black lines across your screen, by scanning the screen twice with the same scan (see explanation Hints&Tips), giving a more stable and unlined screen display. Another source of variation in your screen display is possible by playing with the knobs on the back of your monitor, if it's an Amiga 1080 or similar. You can use the Vertical Height control to squeeze down the screen to reduce the space between scan lines, and with the three controls available you can make all kinds of adjustments - experiment a little. These controls are found at the back left bottom corner of your monitor as you look at the screen. So if you're using the 1.2 system discs, with LaceTogL and Interlace running, with the right colour combinations, and with a program which can handle full re-sizing of windows, you can get twice as much onscreen with minimum irritation. Certainly, it improves SCRIBBLE! and the CLI environment, and if you're doing a lot onscreen at the same time you've got the space for it all. REASON FOR FLICKER Your monitor's screen is coated on the inside with three types of phosphor arranged in tiny triples of vertical red, green and blue bars, hence " RGB" monitor. These different phosphors have different characteristics such as Colour (of course), Fade time and brightness. So in constructing the monitor these variable phosphors must be matched as closely as possible, and this match can't be exact. The 1080 has been made for non-interlaced displays, which means that the electron beam which strikes and excites the phosphors is designed to do so every 1/60th of a second, and the phosphors only have to glow for that time. Thus the phosphors are Short Persistence type, which are cheaper at present. When the interlace is turned on the screen has 400 horizontal scan lines rather than the normal 200. Due to historical video standards the electron beam can only scan 200 lines at a time, so the way around the problem was to scan every second line in one pass of the screen, and then scan the ones between in the next pass. So the first pass excites the phosphors on every second line, the second pass excites the ones in between, and ideally the first set of phosphors glow long enough to merge evenly with the glowing phosphors of the next pass, to create a whole-screen image. The brighter the phosphor, the more quickly it fades. If it fades before 1/30th of a second has passed you get the effect of brightness and dimness on alternate lines on the screen, and as this is a dynamic process the effect is that flicker. So you can see that if you choose dim colours from your Preferences, they will seem to fade more slowly, thus merging better and thus reducing flicker. Alternatively, you can buy a High-Persistence Monitor, in which the more expensive phosphors glow for a little longer and so merge better in the double scan. A side-effect of this can be that if you are moving images around the screen as in an animation, you'll probably have a glowing "trail" left behind. It's interesting to note that monitors depend on the tricks our eyes play to work properly. What's actually happening on screen is that the electron beam is only at one spot at any instant - so anyone with perfect vision would be seeing a black screen. However, our retinas keep an image for a while, which allows us to form a complete merged picture of the screen, and a good thing too. But what is this thing called Reality?