On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Eric Auer wrote:

> could change the font - by writing your own MSHERC (MSHERC
> seems to be used by some MS programming languages as a helper).

MSHERC simply exists because the BIOS did not support the Hercules
graphics card. So switching to graphics mode (without MSHERC) had to be
done by directly programming the CRT controller. MSHERC added the missing
BIOS support (mode #8).

Looking at RBIL you'll also read about the existence of HERCBIOS, HERCULES
and HERKULES.

On a related point you had the CGA emulators such as hgcibm and simcga.
These switched the HGC into a 640x300 mode. CGA was then seen as 640x200
with an empty line every third scanline. So hgcibm also hooked the timer
interrupt to copy the second to the third scanline to make it look less
ugly. Now since the BIOS did support CGA these emulators only needed to
fake the set mode, but not the character drawing.

This was kind of nice to be able to play such CGA games as pacman,
pango, digger, paratrooper, rick dangerous and so on. PC speaker sounds
(which you could not always easily turn off) made you crazy.

In any case, I think you're right, very few programs would use int10/ah=8
to read characters in graphics mode (only works for white foregrounds
anyway), so to worry about codepage changes is really overkill.

Bart

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