windows 10 issue

Mobhack · #27 May 14th, 2016, 03:43 PM

Full screen mode is a proper 256 colour rendering using the palette. That used to be the fastest mode, back in the MSDOS and early windows era.

Windowed mode converts to the colour mode as used by windows. That used to be slower, but no longer is. Neither is GDI mode any slower, since Microsoft sped GDI mode up by using hardware rendering.

GDI mode was really only a hangover for Linux users as I recall, some Linux windows emulators did not handle Directx way back when.

In Windows now, its actually faster to use windowed mode nowadays since the drivers and cards are optimised for it. It is faster to use windowed mode as well since nowadays modern cards now seem to do a pixel by pixel software backwards-compatibility mode conversion that does not utilise their speed, and so 256 colour mode has lost the direct to video hardware speed it once had, and why you get "stuttering" if you use full-screen mode. Additionally, since Microsoft assumes that nobody is using the 256 colour palette, since it is obsolete, windows uses it without any checking for applications relying on it. That is seem most in Windows 7 "Aero" - and why we had to put in a kludge script to kill the Explorer desktop for windows 7 full screen, but 8 and later can do this, as well as simply task switching to the desktop - result is a psychedelic screen on re-entering the programme.

The mode is only there as a carry-over from the old DOS days, back when you had to load special mouse drivers and so on.

Use at your own risk. It is not supported any more, and it probably should have been deleted as an option a long time ago. About the only people it may be of use for are probably long-term free game users who still have a video card that supports full screen 800x600 (Many modern cards just wont go below 1024x768).

Some users liked the mode so they could set a resolution lower than the current desktop, to ease eye strain. But the way round this in windowed mode is to right click on the desktop and select a lower resolution (one that does not stretch the graphics) and then start the game in windowed, desktop resolution. Then right click on the desktop and select the regular size once done playing.

So I for one would be quite happy to kill "full screen" mode completely. Full-screen mode is dead, defunct, it has ceased to be, its pushing up the daisies, if it wasn't nailed to the perch it would have fallen over, it is an ex-parrot. It is only there for those of you still pining for the old DOS fiords...