Comment by fredoralive
11 hours ago
It’s basically just an SD TV signal, the vertical height in lines doesn’t change, it largely just swaps if each line outputs 320 or 640 pixels during its assigned time period.
Having interlaced and non interlaced modes at once seems a bit funky though, but I assume it just forces everything into interlaced with the non interlaced mode sections having the same line sent on both fields?
In TV land, there is no non-interlaced. It's all interlaced. You provide fields at 50Hz/60Hz* and the CRT displays one after the other, interleaved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlaced_video
"Non-interlaced" is just sending the same line for both fields, "interlaced" is sending different lines for each field. You can update your "non-interlaced" screen at 50/60Hz and the viewer will see movement, because it's transmitted for both fields. If you were updating just one line of an interlaced screen at 50/60Hz, it would only be transmitted every second field, so the viewer would perceive 25/30Hz movement.
For high-resolution monitors, Commodore and 3rd parties offered a "flicker fixer", which took the raw output, buffered both fields in its own RAM, and re-emitted the combined image as a single frame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer
*: actually 59.94Hz
No, there is actually a difference between an interlaced and non-interlaced signal. A non-interlaced signal has an integral number of lines per field without the half-line that an interlaced signal would have. With a non-interlaced signal, a classic CRT will scan all of the fields with the same alignment instead of interleaving even/odd fields vertically. There was a definite visual difference between a non-interlaced mode and an interlaced mode repeating the same screen for both fields.