Color and Mono Displays 5150/5161

[frozenfire75i]

Anyone had any experience in connecting both a mono and color display to a 5150 with a 5161 EXP. Unit? How does the setup work the same thing get displayed on both displays? But what happens when it‘s color only what happens to the mono display? Any software/drives needed for this setup? How would the software know what card to call upon?

[MikeS]

They're pretty well completely independent; the DIP switch determines which one the system defaults to on power up and the software will use whichever adapter it was configured for (if possible). Most software used one or the other; some CAD programs used the text screen for commands and the graphic screen for the drawing, and I think one or two spreadsheets (Symphony?) could use both, one for the data and the other for graphs.

The BASIC Screen command will switch from one to the other AFAIK if you're writing your own program or just to play with it.

mike

[frozenfire75i]

thanks so it's kind of silly to have two displays them!

[MikeS]

thanks so it's kind of silly to have two displays them!
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Well, not entirely, depending on what you're doing and if you've got room for the extra monitor. It can certainly be convenient to be able to do text-mode word processing on the Hi-res text mode screen one moment and then pop in and play a CGA game without swapping cards & changing DIP switches etc.

mike

[strollin]

I used a dual monitor setup with Lotus 1-2-3 where the spreadsheet could be displayed on the text-only monochrome screen while graphs could be simultaneously displayed on the color monitor. Worked great.

[Trixter]

thanks so it's kind of silly to have two displays them!

No, quite the opposite! For programming, it's incredibly useful; you can have the program's output on one while you debug on the other.