Hi all, TL;DR: is there a modern open source equivalent of SVGATextMode that works on FreeDOS, supports recent graphics cards and PC emulators, and is not limited to the few (if any) text modes provided by a typical VESA BIOS?
For context: x86 emulators (QEMU, DOSBox, Bochs...) happily allow high-res text modes with as many columns/lines as you want. The closest thing that I'm aware of is an old port of SVGATextMode to DOS, but that's not targeted to emulators and modern cards (nearly all code is from the 90's) and it cannot generate arbitrary modes on the fly: https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/util/user/svgatextmode/ There are also utilities like FreeDOS "mode.com" or a closed-source tm.com/tm.exe tool but they are limited to a max of 90 columns or require VESA BIOS support for each mode. What I want instead is allowing users to just set any number of columns/lines they need. E.g. in emulators manipulating VGA registers to set 160 columns by 50 lines using a normal 9x16 VGA font works great. Its aspect ratio is close to 16:9 when using square pixels and having 160 columns allows editing two files side by side. Note that this is a real text mode, not text output in a graphics mode. Once the 160x50 mode is set lots of stuff "just works": it's supported by the BIOS int 10h output routines (at least in whatever BIOS comes with emulators), by FreeDOS int 21h text output and by a bunch of programs that come in the FreeDOS distribution. E.g. "edit", nansi.sys, the "vi" editor in Open Watcom and most CLI programs work fine. On the other end of the spectrum, lower-resolution modes can be useful when running FreeDOS on very small screens, e.g. 60 columns as a compromise on a phone. Custom text modes with lots of lines can be great for screens rotated by 90 degrees, in portrait mode; e.g. 80 columns by 64 lines with a 9x16 font is taller than it is wide: having so many lines is useful when editing code, looking at compiler errors or writing long texts with WordPerfect. Despite some limitations the nice thing about setting high-res text modes using only generic VGA registers (as opposed to card-specific SuperVGA) is that the same code works ~everywhere and doesn't need a VBE BIOS; the downside is that the VGA pixel clock frequency is too low for high resolution, so traditional graphics cards and CRT screens will not work correctly, but emulators and some laptop graphics cards seem fine. I'm considering adding support for these modes to FreeDOS mode.com but before I propose a patch I wanted to check if there's something similar and open source out there.
_______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
