Monitor Expander is a $25 shareware control panel that allows you to enlarge your desktop area. You can choose to enlarge your desktop by “eating away” at the borders that surround the usable portion of your monitor, thereby increasing the area of the desktop that you can view at one time, or by allowing you to scroll around a virtual desktop that is bigger than the usable portion of your monitor, or both. You can choose from a variety of viewing areas and virtual desktop sizes ranging from the conventional 640x480 to a staggering 1952x2048, which is more than a thirteen-fold increase in desktop area.
REQUIREMENTS
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Monitor Expander requires System 7 or greater and a compatible video card. Compatible video cards are currently the Apple Macintosh II video card (a.k.a. Toby card) and the Apple High Resolution Video Card (a.k.a. HRVC card). Monitor Expander probably works with System 6, but this has not been tested.
REGISTRATION
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Monitor Expander is shareware. You are encouraged to make copies of Monitor Expander and spread them far and wide, provided you also copy the associated documentation. You are allowed to try Monitor Expander for 15 days. If you would like to keep on using it after that period of time you are required to register your copy. To register your copy, open the Monitor Expander control panel, click on the Registration button and a registration dialog with further instructions will appear.
INSTALLATION
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Drag the Monitor Expander Control Panel into your System Folder and reboot. If Monitor Expander finds any compatible video cards it will re-initialize the associated screens, display a gentle shareware reminder on each of the compatible screens and display its icon on the bottom row of the main screen. If no compatible video cards are found the Monitor Expander icon will be crossed out on the bottom row of the screen. Now bring up the Monitors Control Panel, select a compatible screen, click on “Options” and a settings dialog will appear. Select the desired desktop size, viewing area and number of colors. Reboot again and the selected settings will take effect.
HOW TO USE
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If you have set the desktop size to a greater size than the viewing area, you can scroll around the virtual desktop by moving the cursor off the edges of the viewing area. You can also scroll the viewing area around by pressing the control key and one of the arrow keys. You can disable (or re-enable) mouse scrolling by pressing a preset hotkey (see Settings).
SETTINGS
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To set a screen to a new desktop size or viewing area, open the Monitors Control Panel, select the screen in question, click on “Options” and a settings dialog with three lists, and a picture representing the current screen settings will appear. You can change your desktop size by selecting a new size from the “Desktop size” list. Note that the maximum number of colors in the “Colors” list is reduced with increasing desktop size. This is because each video card has only so much video memory, and the video memory used for a given video mode is a function of the selected desktop area and the number of colors used, in short, a bigger desktop means fewer colors.
To change the viewing area, select a new viewing area size from the “Viewing area” list. Note that there are two listings for 704 x 512 viewing area, one labelled “Right” and the other labelled “Left”, you will have to try which settings works with your monitor. You can also set the number of colors you want the screen set to by selecting from the “Colors” list. The picture on the right of the dialog shows the relative size of the viewing area to the desktop size. The light gray rectangle represents the selected viewing area while the dark gray one represents the selected desktop size.
For other settings, open the Monitor Expander Control Panel, click the “Settings…” button and the settings dialog will appear. Anything you type will be set as the hotkey for mouse scrolling enable/disable. You can also turn the scroll enable/disable hotkey on or off by clicking the “Scroll toggle” check box.
You must reboot the computer for the settings to take effect.
KNOWN PROBLEMS
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If you click “Options” in Monitors while the Monitor Expander Control Panel is open, you will get the default monitor settings dialog instead of the Monitor Expander dialog. This is a limitation of the Monitors control panel. Just close the Monitor Expander control panel and try again.
Some system extensions and control panels grab information about the sizes and locations of your screens when they load and then use it later (one notable example is After Dark). If you have any such control panels or system extensions installed on your system, you must ensure that Monitor Expander loads before them to avoid trouble. For System 7 users this can be achieved by dragging the Monitor Expander Control Panel into your Extensions folder and renaming it so that it comes before any system extensions in alphabetical order (something starting with a “!” will most likely do). You can then create an alias to the Monitor Expander control panel and place that in your Control Panels folder. System 6 users need only rename the control panel.
Scrolling is somewhat coarser in the horizontal direction than in the vertical direction, and the coarseness of horizontal scrolling varies with the number of colors the screen is set to. This is a hardware limitation of the Toby and HRVC cards.
Sometimes, when scrolling up or down, there is a flash as the viewing area scrolls past the centre of the desktop. This is also a hardware limitation.
In the settings dialog it is impossible to set the hotkey to the currently set hotkey.
There is currently no way to turn the control-arrow scrolling off.
Monitor Expander currently has no special provisions for video cards with 256K video RAM (such cards are restricted to 16 colors, you need 512K of video RAM for 256 colors). If you use Monitor Expander with such a card some video modes will give you strange results. Specifically, the bottom half of your screen will be blank and anything you scroll out of this “void” will be random dots. If you can get to the monitors control panel you can try to set the monitor to fewer colors, if this does not rectify the situation you’ll have to set the monitor to another mode via the Options dialog. If you can’t get to the Monitors Control Panel you’ll have to restart your computer without extensions (hold down shift while the computer is booting), open the Control Panels folder and the Monitors Control Panel and move both windows so that they are contained in the top half of the screen. Now reboot your computer again, this time with extensions loaded, and proceed as above.
DISCLAIMER
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The author makes no warranties, either express or implied, regarding Monitor Expander. Use of Monitor Expander is at your own risk. The author claims no liability for data loss or other problems caused directly or indirectly by Monitor Expander.
VERSION HISTORY
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1.0.1 Feb. 1. 1994
Fixed the random icon placement bug, now honors special gamma settings.
