berdinkerdickle

Now that is cool!
Excellent Find

Does it change appearance when charging?

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Just call me Berd.
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coppertop

The "Start" button (got my terminology down) works fine at 128dpi but is disabled with 96dpi. It may be a conflict between RealVGA and SPB Mobile Shell.

Your logic on the dpi is correct but for me, 96dpi shrinks everything making it hard to read. The reason I asked about 192dpi is that there is a 192dpi screen shot over at XDA developers and was curious how that was achieved.

Another curiosity. What's the attraction? I'm testing RealVGA and for the life of me can't tell the difference with or without it.

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WMguy

Yep, there are color change options for when charging. My battery outline turns red when charging.

WMguy

If you mean RealVGA in general, check out the screen shot above. Without RealVGA, only three out of four of the weather days are visible. Also, the RSS headlines at the bottom would just about or would be off the screen and require scrolling.
Not sure that's what you meant but RealVGA shows a lot more on the screen even if you bump up the font size in WM settings.

coppertop

discovered that SPB doesn't support RealVGA. That's probably causing the Start button issue. Uninstalled SPB and the button works fine with 96dpi.

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berdinkerdickle

Here's some screen shots from sabre23t:

I like how it gives me more usable screen space.

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berdinkerdickle

See how much smaller the bars at the top and bottom are.
See how much smaller the icons are.
The benifit is more usable screen






Also, PIE+ actually renders better with 96dpi

As a side note;
when I go back to 128dpi, everything seems way too huge.

RealVGA is a must now for me.

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Me2

It is mind bogglingly confusing isn't it. AFAIK the principle it that RealVGA dpi setting is telling the OS what screen to pretend it has, rather than the screen they are displaying on.

Old standard QVGA devices had ~96dpi screens so the icons were created at 96dpi to display correctly (i.e. no scaling)

VGA screens are ~192dpi. 320x320 screen are ~128dpi. Displaying an icon designed for a 96dpi screen on that would obviously be too small as the pixels are closer together than originally intended. But if you magnified up the original 96 dpi icon image so it is the right proportion to the screen, it would look jagged and awful. So to cater for VGA screens the developer has to create a version of every icon at "for 192dpi screens" as well as for the TP (128dpi) and "standard" 96dpi screens, and embed these in the program.

Now the default WM behaviour is to scale everything up (or down) for compatibility so that if your are using a 192dpi screen, it selects the icons and images designed to look "normal" on a 192dpi device, pixel-doubles text and generally messes things up so the look and feel is exactly the same as any other Pocket PC, but with smoother fonts.

What RealVGA does is to override the WM hardware detection and make it think you are using an old-school, bog standard, screen, and therefore to use the 96dpi icons & fonts, and present everything 1:1 (where 1 pixel in an image = 1 pixel on the screen) and not to try and do anything clever like scaling. Except of course that the actual display has lots more dots available, so you get lots more text "estate" on the screen.

So setting RealVGA to 96dpi doesn't mean "set the pixel density to 96dpi", it means "tell Windows we only have a 96dpi screen", which stops it trying to "dumb down" / scale/ magnify / pixel-double everything so it looks like QVGA.

Well that's how I've just tried to explain it to myself. Probably won't make any sense when read back!

berdinkerdickle

perfect sense
thanks

oVan

Sorry, however well intended, that explanation is too complicated .

RealVGA does not do anything special, in fact you can get the same results without RealVGA:
* It sets a few registry entries for dpi settings. You can do this yourself.
* It replaces some dll files with the other-dpi variants; this is purely cosmetic. They take the 96-dpi version because the dialogs will be drawn correctly, but this is not necessary to make your phone work at 96dpi, it will just look better.

That's all... no hardware translation etc. just registry and dll replacement.

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oVan

The reason that it feels strange about 96dpi resulting in smaller items and 128dpi or 192dpi in larger items is simple:

When you tell your device that you have a high-resolution screen (128, 192, ...), Microsoft wants to show approximately the same information as on low-res screens. Therefore they use bigger fonts and icons, resulting in a high-definition version of the original.

Now when you manually switch to 96dpi, WM doesn't need to use big fonts as you pretend to have a low-res screen. Big fonts would make all text clip on dialog boxes.

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oVan

Sorry to be so late with my reply. SPB does work in RealVGA as soon as we find a custom skin for 320x320. Apparently older versions (2.0) did work, but the latest ones broke that.

The fact that your Start-key appears to be not working is because the latest SPB Mobile Shell versions map that button to the Now-screen of SPB. As Mobile Shell currently doesn't show in 96dpi mode, you get nothing...

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Ebag333

*cough*

Real VGA (Increased resolution, application compatability)

I'd be willing to create a version that works with the Treo Pro. Everything should work from what I have now, the only things that might not work would be the today plugins and dialer.

In the latest version of the script (found at the bottom of the first post, it's newer than what's in the installer) there are two new options to just change DPI and not mess with today plugins or anything else.

Someone want to give it a shot and let me know?

Me2

That's just what I said, though yours sounded much better I never said it did anything clever with hardware.

As for the DIY approach, try that on a VGA device where you have 4 modes to choose from...

coppertop

Thank you for the explanation.

Let me ask one more technical question; I understand the attraction to 96dpi but does the 128dpi setting do anything that the regular old setting won't?

I've got to re-read a few post but does the 128dpi setting give you a little more "giddy-up" with the processor?

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Ebag333

Neither of these are quite correct. It has nothing to do with high res or low res screens, or pretending about anything.


It's actually a very misleading term and not quite correct. DPI controls the pixel dimensions. But only in one direction.

So by going from 128 DPI to 96 DPI we *COULD* keep the same image size, but have a less detailed image. This is not what we want to do.

128 DPI (or PPI as it's also known as) will give you a 37x37 pixel image. We don't want a less detailed image of the same size, so when we reduce the DPI we also reduce the dimensions. 96 DPI will give you a 28x28 pixel image.


Now where this falls apart is that many images used are not always 128 or 96 DPI. For example, many of the Pocket Outlook SMS icons found in the outres.128.dll (the 128 stands for the DPI) are actually 72 DPI, which is a 21x21 pixel image.

The outres.96.dll also uses a 72 pixels/inch image, but is only a 16x16 pixel image. This is where it breaks down, because while DPI can relate to image size, it doesn't always.

DPI is actually quite subjunctive and you will find lots of different ways of measuring it.


Regardless of the actual DPI of the image, or the pixel size, what it amounts to is that 96 DPI images are approx 75% the size of the 128 DPI images. This is why we feel like we have a "bigger" screen, because if every image on your screen is 3/4ths the size that it used to be, you can fit a lot more stuff on that screen.

It's not quite that simple, but that's the gist of it.

The main thing that RealVGA does is tell WM which set of .DLL's to use. That's why you have to have *.96.dll versions of everything installed on your phone.

The Pro uses 128 DPI by default, so the 128 DPI setting in RealVGA will do nothing but get you back to what you have by default.

berdinkerdickle

is one setting (128 vs 96) easier on the display?

will one setting (128 vs 96) give you quicker screen refresh (giving the giddy up feel) ?

Because I felt the switch between screens was a little quicker with 96.

Ebag333

Theoretically 128 should be easier because there's simply less stuff on the screen (or at least less room for more stuff).

In reality, you're displaying the same resolution (320x320) so regardless of the DPI you've still got the same real estate. So no, there won't be a speed difference.

hjt

Sorry to be a bit slow.

Just to double check - RealVGA doesn't work with SPB Mobile Shell? I really like Mobile Shell but it doesn't seem to display at all with RealVGA installed. I've read the posts here and this is what they suggest....

hjt

I've just tried Winterface - it hangs on the Treo Pro - with OR without RealVGA. I think for now I'll give RealVGA a miss. I really like it but I do miss Mobile Shell.