On May 20, 2024, at 1:37 PM, Wayne S via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Young , hah. No i’m old 70.
The pc monitors, not Tv, always had a setup menu. Even the Vt100 series let you choose
interlace if you needed.
VT100? I don't think so. And yes, it has a setup menu, but that's setup of the
terminal functionality, not the monitor part.
The earliest monitors could only handle one format. A major innovation was
"multisync" where the monitor would determine the horizontal and vertical sweep
rate and line count, and display things the right way. The first PC I owned had one of
those, and as far as I can remember it had nothing that one would call a "setup
menu".
The reason interlace matters is not the very slight slope of the scan line in analog
monitors, but rather the fact that alternate frames are offset by half the line spacing of
the basic frame, so each frame sweeps out the gaps in between the lines scanned by the
preceding frame. It matters to get that right, otherwise you're not correctly
displaying consecutive rows of pixels. In particular, when doing scan conversion (from
analog format to a digital X/Y pixel raster) you have to offset Y by one every other frame
if interlace is used, but not if it isn't.
paul