The screen on my Nokia Communicator or Psion Series 5 seems very squashed. Are you sure this is MCGA, and can you make it easier to read?

A real MCGA screen is generally up to 640 pixels wide by 200 pixels high. On a PC video monitor the screen is interlaced, and the 200 rows are scanned twice, giving an apparent aspect ratio of 640 x 400. As an historical aside, this meant that programmers drawing shapes onto MCGA screens needed to allow for an elongating effect - a shape drawn 20 pixels wide and 20 pixels high was NOT a square.

The Nokia Communicator has a screen that is also 640 pixels wide by 200 pixels high, so it has the same information as a real MCGA screen. The Communicator pixels are however pretty much square, so representing an MCGA display on the Communicator 640 x 200 screen makes it look squashed, even though it has exactly the same information on it as the corresponding PC monitor display.

The Psion Series 5 screen is 640 pixels wide by 240 pixels high; at first glance bigger than the MCGA resolution. Of the 40 extra pixel rows though, we currently use 30 of them for the soft key toolbar, and the other 10 are unused, leaving us with exactly the same 640 x 200 pixel display as the Communicator. Again, the information is all there, but it looks slightly distorted.

MCGA mode 17 uses a 640 x 480 resolution; when this is scaled to fit into the Communicator or Series 5 screen, more than half the scan lines are omitted, making it of limited value on the small screen.

You can Zoom in on text screens under XTM to make the characters bigger, but this means that not all the 25 rows can be displayed at once. XTM chooses which rows to display by tracking the text cursor and making sure it is always visible.