I am looking for the simplest way to "turn off" specific lines in a LPT, that is, just display BG color. I will be doing this modification dynamically to a LPT, so the fewer bytes I need to modify, the better!
Messing with the palette entries is no good for 256-color mode, and also in lower color modes it requires several bytes to be modified.
Changing the VRAM-address where gfx is being read is one way to do it, requires 2 bytes of modification per line.
I then read an interesting piece of information in the "Nick Chip Programmers Guide":
If the right margin is set to a lower value than the left margin then the entire mode line will be border colour, with no active display.
I tried this, but at least in EP128Emu having a lower right margin than left margin led to a lot of garbage graphics.
However, having the same value as both left and right (for example 11,11 or 51,51) seems to give the effect I want - the line is empty, and I only have to modify one single byte per line in my LPT to enable/disable display of that line.
Is this a "good" way to do it, or will I be running into problems with that solution?