First… There seems to be a general misunderstanding that DOS only supports 80x25 columns. While it is possible that an extremely lazy programmer would hard code for that resolution, most did not. Even back in the early days the display could be in 40x25, 80x43, 80x50 and numerous other text resolutions. Through the use of special text mode fonts, most VGA cards could even support different font heights producing very unusual display resolutions such as 80x20, 80x16, 40x22, etc. Therefore it was always a bad idea to hard code support for a single display resolution into software.
Overall, the operating system software provided with FreeDOS, MS-DOS and the others work fine in all text mode resolution as long as they have BIOS support. As for other none-base software, you may have mixed results. It just depends on skill of the programmer and how much effort they put into that aspect of their software. The real issue lays with BIOS support of text modes over 80 columns. Back in the 386/486 days, many cards supported “high resolution” graphics modes. Since DOS was still a primary market for such cards, many vendors included support for higher resolution text modes in the BIOS (like 132x43). Those higher resolution modes generally worked fine under DOS. As Windows and graphical desktops in general became popular, the card manufacturers changed their focus away from text mode. With each iteration, fewer and fewer cards included support for high resolution text modes in the BIOS. The newer the video card, the less likely it is to support text modes with over 80 columns. Out of the older hardware I have laying around, my 486 has the most text modes and PentiumPro only has a few extras. But, all the newer stuff doesn’t have any. Sure they have way more graphics modes, but none of the newer stuff includes any high resolution text modes. If you want to see what text video modes are supported by your hardware, try LISTVESA. As the name suggests, it will show all the VESA modes supported by the card. http://ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/listvesa.html <http://ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/pkg-html/listvesa.html> Although VESA is the generally the standard way to discover such modes in DOS, some vendors were known to provide access to additional modes using the standard BIOS mode change function. Those can be problematic to discover. For example, DOSBox has a couple such modes. It provides a 132x25 as mode 0x55 (I think) and mode 132x43 as mode 0x54 (I think). A tool to easily change to those standard, additional or VESA modes is the VMODE utility. It is part of V8Power Tools. However, earlier versions did not support those additional modes that were non-standard (like 0x55). So, make sure you have the latest version of V8Power Tools. The newest version can switch to standard, additional and VESA modes. https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/v8power.html <https://fd.lod.bz/repos/current/pkg-html/v8power.html> :-) Jerome
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