OT: Color, the SCO console vs FacetWin

[John Esak]

Hello,

I'm going to ask a very off-topic question here just in case anyone knows
the answer. I'm also forwarding this to FacetCorp support.

I have a 2 position (manual, passive no electronics) KMV switch. (A
keyboard, mouse and video switch)...  It lets me change between my Unix
machine and my PC. I never use the Unix side... except in very rare
occasions when I might reboot the machine or something. My current uptime is
142 days (knock on wood :-)  Anyway, the other side of the switch puts me
onto a PC with very fast CPU, big (you know, powerful) video card running
Win 2k Professional.

This question is, oh I don't know... about the electronic level of things
inside the drivers of each system I guess. Here is the situation. If I run
FacetWin's terminal emulator on the PC side into the Unix box and issue a
"setcolor" command, I get the display of colors just fine. Everything looks
great. I mean really, how can you judge these things?  It looks fine to me
and everyone else. No problem. The very same is true of the Unix side of the
switch. If I issue a "setcolor" command, the display is perfect, crisp
clear, just fine. The only difference and it is significant and dramatic to
me... is that the brightness of the colors on the Unix side (direct console
in other words) is WAY brighter. I don't mean a little brighter. I mean WAY
WAY brighter. So much so, that I can see the little word "red" next to the
red block of color. When I switch to the PC side (Windows running the video
driver now) the little word "red" is _completely_ invisible to me.  Now, my
wife says it is fine, still very visible, so it is not wrong or anything,
just very, very dim in comparison to the Unix/console driver side.
(Incidentally, she does say that the Unix/console display of setcolor is WAY
brighter to her also... but she has no problem seeing the red in either
case. She tells me that the colors on the Windows/driver side is probably
30% dimmer than the Unix side... the word "red" is much harder to see, but
doesn't present a problem to her.  Well, you all know I can not see most of
any day, but the times when my eyes do come on, I like to see whatever I can
even if it is just for minutes and just for very short periods of time. So,
you have to believe me I can not see the little word "red" at all on the
Windows/driver side... not even a tiny bit. There is just the pure black of
the background screen there where the word should be.

Now, of course, this has to do with my retina and the whole functioning (or
lack of it) in my eye. No problem. I can deal with that. However, what I
want to know is this... What in the world can the SCO/console driver be
issuing to the pins on that 15 pin DB video connector that the Windows
driver is not issuing?  I mean, there are no _varying_ degrees of intensity
for the color scheme on SCO O/S5. Other than blinking the color, there is no
way to get various shades of red, or what is more important to me, various
levels of intensity. I believe it's just high and low... that's it.

So, why is it that the display on the Unix side of the switch where the Unix
box drives the monitor directly SO much brighter (and completely and easily
visible to me) is so much different from the Windows side which is running
through some sort of a sophisticated full color driver first. Like I say,
the colors all look very similar just the one side is very very dim
comparatively. Is there some number the FacetWin side could add to its color
pallet values that would duplicate the intensity of the direct Unix console
driver?  If not, why not? What in the world is the number (electrical or
otherwise) that the SCO driver is issuing that puts the display up so much
brighter than the Windows driver?  And if there is some way the Windows
driver could be made to generate this vastly brighter, more visible output,
could it be implemented just inside the FaceWin terminal emulator program
window and not the whole Windows desktop?  In other words, is such a thing
application dependant or system dependant, or device driver dependant? What
I'm getting at is how can the brightness be raised in the Windows driver to
match that of the SCO console?  Don't they both have to present equal
electronic configurations of the signal to the DB15 video connector for the
monitor's use? To make one signal so much brighter than the other, there
_must_ be something different in the SCO video driver. I would love to know
what it is and how to get it implemented in the Windows driver, but there is
no such control under Windows... or SCO for that matter. They each just must
be doing something different. Why would they???  (BTW, this is absolutely
NOT hardware related in any way. I have done numerous and I mean numerous
experiments with many, many different cards in both machines. The situation
remains absolutely constant... the SCO side is perfectly bright and visible,
the Windows side is dim and "red" is invisible. Also, I have played for
hours, and days and probably months with the various resolution settings of
the various boards on the Windows side... this, of course, has nothing to do
with the brightness of anything. I just wanted to assure myself that it is
not any part of the problem.)

The screen itself that I use is a 20" Planar thin screen. The model is
unimportant, this happens on any and all screens I attach to the KMV switch.
I have tried many. No difference. As for the tests I've done, I only use
"scoansi" as the emulation under FacetWin and ansi as the TERM value on SCO.

Thanks in advance for any advice about this. Anyone out there with a SCO
OpenServer box a windows box and a passive switch that can do this simple
test for me, please let me know if you see it the same way. Of course, I'd
be interested if the problem exists on an active, software driven,
electronic KMV system as well, but my bet is the displays would match
exactly.  It is the direct connect to the Unix console driver that is making
things so nice and bright which I want to learn about. I only want to know
enough to determine whether the same level of brightness can be had _inside_
the FacetWin terminal emulator window. The rest of the PC side is fine as it
is. However, if the only ability to fix this (and I think this is going to
be the case) is to somehow juice up the output of the Windows video card
itself... so that the whole screen gets brighter, I certainly wouldn't care.
I realize I might have to pick one video card for the PC, get the problem
demonstrable with it, and then send the whole situation to Microsoft...
because since I've tried so many different cards and drivers and they all
remain exactly the same, it seems that the problem must be somewhere in the
Windows O/S itself. Perhaps, it is throttling back the intensity level being
sent to the video jack...?  I don't see what else it could be. Something
that SCO doesn't do, or they set the throttling to a higher level?  I hate
being so technically naive about this stuff... some areas are just too
involved to investigate and still maintain some rational level of work/time
for normal life. :-)  So thanks for any ideas.

John Esak