Does changing to 40 columns just use half the screen, or does it make
the font larger to accommodate?
If the latter, it might be a way to make the font larger.
Only ever used 40 columns on apple II/E computers that only had 40
colomn screens, never used it in dos where 80 column modes were available.
On 6/19/2025 5:31 PM, Jerome Shidel via Freedos-user wrote:
On Jun 19, 2025, at 1:03 PM, Eric Auer via Freedos-user
<freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
Hi!
How can I make the system font bigger?
(e.g. setting the display to 20 lines instead of 25)
I am using cga.
Hmm. CGA. Not even EGA or VGA. In VGA, you would get:
C:\>mode con lines=42
Lines must be 25, 28, 43 or 50, or font size 8, 14 or 16.
If you have VESA, 30, 34 or 60 lines can be available, too.
Given that CGA has 320x200 and 640x200 modes, you could
try to load some 8x14 or 8x16 font, but that would mean
only 12 or 14 lines.
In addition, the CGA BIOS does not contain fonts larger
than 8x8, so you would have to use the DOS DISPLAY driver
to load the larger fonts. However, that driver probably
ALSO will assume that you only want 8x8 fonts and fail
to load the larger fonts.
According to wikipedia, CGA only supports ROM fonts.
I guess it just does not have enough graphics RAM.
You could only switch to a slow graphics mode and let
the BIOS render the text in software. Should work for
software which does not directly access text screen
buffer memory and only uses DOS or BIOS to show text.
Regards, Eric
As Eric said, I am fairly sure it is not really possible with CGA.
However, on VGA there are tricks...
You can load a font that has variety of lines for vertical height.
From around 8 to around 30. It depends on hardware. I think
26 was about the maximum reliable height.
Loading such a font does affect the total number of lines on
the screen.
To demonstrate, run PGME, go to the Eternal Menu and
execute the Eternal Doc (BigText). It will temporarily load a
larger font in text mode resulting in (I think) 80x15 text mode.
However, you would still be in the default video mode and many
programs will not check and assume it is 80x25. So, I would not
recommend permanently installing a taller font for general usage.
That being said, the VGA font has a lot of padding. Many years
ago, I created a font and TSR to provide bigger text without
Increasing the font size.
It won’t help you because it requires VGA. But, if anyone else
wants to give it a try, you can download it from GitLab at
https://github.com/shidel/DustyTP7/blob/master/bin/LARGE.COM
Interestingly, it won’t effect the font under any of the DOSBoxs.
But, works fine on real hardware and the VMs I have tested.
:-)
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