fp & vista

[Fairlight]

On Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 03:19:24PM -0500, after drawing runes in goat's blood,
Brian K. White cast forth these immortal, mystical words:
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Kenneth Brody" <kenbrody at spamcop.net>
> To: "Fairlight" <fairlite at fairlite.com>
> Cc: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
> Sent: Friday, February 13, 2009 2:14 PM
> Subject: Re: fp & vista
> 
> 
> > Quoting Fairlight (Fri, 13 Feb 2009 13:54:27 -0500):
> > 
> >> When asked his whereabouts on Fri, Feb 13, 2009 at 11:50:23AM -0500,
> >> Kenneth Brody took the fifth, drank it, and then slurred:
> >>>
> >>> filePro will, if Vista allows it.  On some computers, Vista will refuse to
> >>> let you put a console window into "full screen" mode, and will insist that
> >>> you use "windowed" mode.
> >>
> >> Has anyone perchance nailed this down to a specific release of Vista?
> >> Perhaps that feature is only in Professional and Ultimate, for instance.
> > 
> > It's not the release of Vista, but rather the video device driver.
> > 
> >     http://support.microsoft.com/kb/926657
> > 
> > It is also my understanding that fullscreen mode has been deprecated by
> > Microsoft, and anything that is actually fully compliant with Vista's
> > requirements will forbid fullscreen mode.
> 
> What? What about video players? Can't watch a dvd without window borders, buttons, mouse pointer, taskbar?? don't forget that lovely antivirus updater popup... yeah.
> And all those gamers playing all those full immersion first person perspective games?
> Heck even the browser has a full screen mode, though I haven't verified that
> still exists in vista.
> 
> So if an app really wanted to be full-screen text, it should be
> able to use whatever methods those types of apps use to "legally"
> operate in full screen mode.
> 
> I once played with a terminal emulator for mac that used the 3d
> hardware in the video card to render it's fonts out of vectors,
> which suggests that movies/games don't use mechanisms that aren't
> suitable to draw text.

I suspect there's a nomenclature desync, here.

My presumption is that Ken is meaning "fullscreen DOS Console" when he says
"fullscreen".

Your presumption seems to be "fullscreen" == "fullscreen".

Since I know dozens of games and applications that are explicitly Vista
certified that indeed run fullscreen DX10 on Vista, I'm presuming my
interpretation is closer, and yours is overly broad.

They'll pry fullscreen in the true sense from our cold dead gaming and
video-watching hands.  Certain monitors -require- fullscreen from their
applications, purely because they require Vertical Sync to prevent tearing
when panning rapidly left<->right.  You can't use V-Sync in windowed mode,
period.  It's a non-starter.  It's a fullscreen feature.  

In fact, the ability to force V-Sync on is in the NVidia ForceWare drivers,
which are WHQL Certified.

They'd have to be massive idiots to do away with fullscreen and screw over
all the people that need V-Sync.

Well, okay, they're massive idiots anyway, by definition.  But you know
what I mean...  :)

I think you jumped the gun on this one, if you think about what's out there
already.  Hell, they publish games themselves under their Games for Windows
label that break your interpretation.  There's no version of Halo 2 or 3
for XP--they're Vista-only, because MS are greedy bastards that wanted to
force people to adopt Vista like they felt Halo forced people to adopt
XBox.  And those two Microsoft-published games run in complete fullscreen.

mark->
-- 
"I'm not subtle. I'm not pretty, and I'll piss off a lot of people along
the way. But I'll get the job done" --Captain Matthew Gideon, "Crusade"