Monday, July 26, 2004
SE_VGA: Get "Real VGA" On Your WM2003SE VGA Pocket PC
Posted by Janak Parekh in "SOFTWARE" @ 08:00 AM
VGA Pocket PC owners who miss their ultra-high res First Edition setups, rejoice! You now have multiple "resolution choices" when using WM2003SE -- in fact, you're about to regain the functionality that we all had with ResFix or MyVGA. (Click on the picture for a full-resolution version.)
Here's the download link. Best of all, it's free... so what are you waiting for? :D
For the rest of you, read on for a more thorough description of how Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition handles VGA screens, what's good and bad about it, and a quick look at how SE_VGA works around it.
On Friday, I excitedly flashed my Toshiba e805 with the US release of the Second Edition firmware. While it's very cool, there's one major limitation with how SE handles VGA out of the box: it's designed to essentially give you the same amount of useable screen space as First Edition running at 240x320, just with larger fonts and icons -- i.e., akin to "scaling" the resolution of picture up. Instead of something like the following (click any picture for a full version):
You get something like this:
While I've resized both images to 300x400, the effect should be clear: while the second image is much more detailed and representative of a much larger bitmap, you effectively get no more working space. There's a slider in the Control Panel to decrease the font size, but it only goes so far. In particular, it doesn't change the Start/Menu bars and it doesn't get around the fact that Pocket Internet Explorer doubles image sizes by design! Moreover, old non-SE-aware Pocket PC programs simply get pixel-doubled -- so programs like Acrobat Reader don't benefit from the additional VGA pixels (in fact, eReader looks terrible). Fortunately, a Pocket PC developer named Angel Garcia developed a solution: SE_VGA. If you run it, you get the following screen and choices:
Choosing the first option gives you "real VGA" -- that is, the 240x320 screen just increased in resolution without any font or UI size changes:
While that looks extremely small, it's quite useable. It might not be for the average person on a 3.5" screen, perhaps, but it's perfectly readable for the power user like me on my 4" Toshiba. In fact, the effect is almost identical to First Edition users using the ResFix or MyVGA hack on their e805s. Additionally, pixel doubling is turned off for all applications in this mode, so programs like eReader run flawlessly at the higher resolution, and PIE doesn't double image sizes. The only catch? You have to soft-reset when switching modes, and a few programs get slightly confused (for example, Pocket Plus always uses the large-size icons on the Today screen in both VGA modes). Apart from that, it's free and definitely worth a look if you have a WM2003SE VGA device. You can also run in 240x320 mode ("standard QVGA"), explicitly, if you want... although I'll probably switch between the two VGA modes. :)
Here's the download link. Best of all, it's free... so what are you waiting for? :D
For the rest of you, read on for a more thorough description of how Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition handles VGA screens, what's good and bad about it, and a quick look at how SE_VGA works around it.
On Friday, I excitedly flashed my Toshiba e805 with the US release of the Second Edition firmware. While it's very cool, there's one major limitation with how SE handles VGA out of the box: it's designed to essentially give you the same amount of useable screen space as First Edition running at 240x320, just with larger fonts and icons -- i.e., akin to "scaling" the resolution of picture up. Instead of something like the following (click any picture for a full version):
You get something like this:
While I've resized both images to 300x400, the effect should be clear: while the second image is much more detailed and representative of a much larger bitmap, you effectively get no more working space. There's a slider in the Control Panel to decrease the font size, but it only goes so far. In particular, it doesn't change the Start/Menu bars and it doesn't get around the fact that Pocket Internet Explorer doubles image sizes by design! Moreover, old non-SE-aware Pocket PC programs simply get pixel-doubled -- so programs like Acrobat Reader don't benefit from the additional VGA pixels (in fact, eReader looks terrible). Fortunately, a Pocket PC developer named Angel Garcia developed a solution: SE_VGA. If you run it, you get the following screen and choices:
Choosing the first option gives you "real VGA" -- that is, the 240x320 screen just increased in resolution without any font or UI size changes:
While that looks extremely small, it's quite useable. It might not be for the average person on a 3.5" screen, perhaps, but it's perfectly readable for the power user like me on my 4" Toshiba. In fact, the effect is almost identical to First Edition users using the ResFix or MyVGA hack on their e805s. Additionally, pixel doubling is turned off for all applications in this mode, so programs like eReader run flawlessly at the higher resolution, and PIE doesn't double image sizes. The only catch? You have to soft-reset when switching modes, and a few programs get slightly confused (for example, Pocket Plus always uses the large-size icons on the Today screen in both VGA modes). Apart from that, it's free and definitely worth a look if you have a WM2003SE VGA device. You can also run in 240x320 mode ("standard QVGA"), explicitly, if you want... although I'll probably switch between the two VGA modes. :)
