[hatari-devel] New Monitor/Window options dialog feedback?

Eero Tamminen eerot at users.berlios.de
Sat Mar 13 20:12:45 CET 2010


Hi,

On Saturday 13 March 2010, Thomas H. wrote:
> > I'm mainly interested on comments on removal of the Zoom checkbox and
> > replacing it with the "Max doubled" option that gives you more control
> > on what size TT & Falcon resolutions come up.
>
> I gave it a quick try, and noticed a couple of things:
>
> 1) As I described earlier already, I dislike the word "doubling" here,
> since doubling only means scaling by factor 2. However, this does not
> apply for all Falcon resolutions.
>
> 2) "Window" is also somewhat misleading. Hatari runs also on systems that
> do not have a window manager at all (e.g. Wii). I suggest to use "Video"
> or "Host screen" or something similar instead.

Hm.  Should the "Monitor" dialog name to change too?
Then it would be "Atari screen" and "Host screen".


> 3) The "Max doubled" resolution setting feels very unintuitive. It took
> me a while till a figured out that I now have to increase the horizontal
> resolution to 832 instead of 800 to enable zooming of ST low resolution
> (with borders).

That of course depends on one's border values (and therefore I like your
suggestion later on).  The default max resolution values can be set so that
screen gets doubled also with max borders.


> The normal Hatari users likely do not now about the 
> resolution of the emulated system, so I guess they will be _very_
> confused when they try to enable or disable the  zooming now. I suggest
> to add the "Zoom low resolution" checkbox again to avoid this confusing
> situation.

How it should work UI wise?  Use of that conflicts with specifying the size
of resolution.

And if the resolution of whatever the "Zoom low resolution" uses, isn't
suitable for the user, that's even worse.  One of the reasons for being able
to specify the resolution is making sure that it will fit suitably to users'
screen[1].  I.e. user can put there his screen size and Hatari adopts to
that.

[1] Therefore I made max resolution to have more priority than borders
setting (and user gets a dialog when it doesn't fit).


> Another idea: Instead of using "Max doubled" resolution setting, you
> could rename it to "Preferred resolution"

The problem with that name is that user isn't going to get his preferred
resolution:
- Falcon/TT resolution have only integer scaling factor
- ST/STE resolution only doubles

So I'd rather keep the "Max" in the name...


> or so, and then for ST/STE mode, you could use it to configure
> the border sizes in zoomed mode instead  (i.e. the nWindowBorderPixels
> and nFullScreenBorderPixels settings). 
> What do you think? 

That sounds better, but if border size is taken from Max size, what should
them be done about the border pixels settings?

Remove them?  Use them as maximum border values?

I guess, unlike now, doubling will then have more priority over having
borders?  I mean, if user specifies 640x400 as max resoution, he would get
doubled low res without borders...


	- Eero



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