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Years ago when I envied demoscene programmers I tried to do animation by way of the redefining VGA font table quickly. I never succeeded in getting that to work for any reasonable frame-rate. Is anybody aware of examples of software that did that and were able to achieve a reasonable frame-rate? I'd love to look at the code, even >25 years later, just for fun.
Can anyone say what the characters in rows B, C and D in their character map here would be used for? http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/essays-researc...
A good example is Turbo Vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
This is as good of a place as any to ask this: Years ago when I envied demoscene programmers I tried to do animation by way of the redefining VGA font table quickly. I never succeeded in getting that to work for any reasonable frame-rate. Is anybody aware of examples of software that did that and were able to achieve a reasonable frame-rate? I'd love to look at the code, even >25 years later, just for fun.
Can anyone say what the characters in rows B, C and D in their character map here would be used for? http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/essays-researc...
Those are line-drawing and shading characters. They were used all the time in MS-DOS programs (to great good, in my opinion) for textual "windowing" UIs (a "TUI"). A good example is Turbo Vision: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision
For actual fonts you can use in your terminal emulators and whatnot, visit https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/download/
Those are missing tons of Unicode glyphs, for obvious reasons. Dmitry Bolkhovityanov maintains an expanded-coverage font[1] which has been converted to many useful formats[2]. 1 - https://www.inp.nsk.su/~bolkhov/files/fonts/univga/ 2 - http://sciops.net/downloads/vga/ (my site)
Also very happy to see an outline version on your site since BDF fonts aren't very usable after Pango 1.44 broke support for them: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/pango/-/issues/386
Can anyone say what the characters in rows B, C and D in their character map here would be used for? http://www.alexandrugroza.ro/microelectronics/essays-researc...
Font loader TSRs... Blast from the past there. You don't have to have the font table resident in the "resident" kernel of the TSR, hook timer and 21h and use the timer to check if the VGA font table has been changed; when it has, raise a flag and next 21h hook can safely re-read that data from a file and cram it into video ram again.
Do you recall "DOSBLOOD.EXE", a font loader TSR that made the letters look like they were dripping?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you recall "DOSBLOOD.EXE", a font loader TSR that made the letters look like they were dripping?
This sounds fascinating, although "DOSBLOOD.EXE" only returns one Google result, being this comment. I assume it would work by constantly modifying the bitmap font?
After 30+ years of XGA and higher I've forgotten what coding on an 80x25 terminal felt like. Cramped. The answer is "cramped".
It depends on the language. Modern languages feel like that because they evolved on high resolution workstation screens with GUIs that could use smaller fonts. You can do 132x50 on most SVGA cards, but you’ll want a bigger screen for that (and the fonts will be ugly 8x8 or 6x8 ones). Writing BASIC on 80x25 feels constrained, but 80x35 is much better. Java would be a lot more concise if it was designed with VT-100s in…