Extended Video Modes

The latest release of zeST now features additional video screen modes, taking into account the unused pixels at the screen borders in colour modes. This allows user programs to achieve screen sizes of 416x276 pixels in low resolution, and 832x276 in medium resolution.

This is completely done in hardware. Extended modes can be enabled or disabled by changing the value of an additional bit in the hardware resolution register.

For compatibility reasons, this feature is disabled by default, and must be activated in the zest.cfg configuration file (see the dedicated section of the Getting started) page.

GEM support

You can also use those pictures in the GEM desktop, by just copying the supplied EXTMOD.PRG driver program file into your boot disk’s AUTO folder.

Here are screen captures of zeST running GEM on TOS and EmuTOS:

A screenshot of zeST running EmuTOS’s GEM desktop at extended medium resolution (832x276 pixels instead of 640x200)

A screenshot of zeST running the GEM desktop at extended low resolution (416x276 pixels instead of 320x200)

A screenshot of an zeST running the Devpac development environment, at extended resolution, leading to more text being displayed on a single page

Future improvements

This latest release (as of 2023/11/25) only provides extended modes for low and medium resolutions. Support for high resolution (monochrome) extended modes will most probably come with next release.

Conclusion

As usual, for download and installation, please visit the Getting started page.

For any comments, please do so by replying to the dedicated Mastodon post.