Today, in the bus to work...

AFAIK The Apricot had no true text mode eithre. The Aprocot vidoe system is a bit strange. There's the normal 'CRT controller' to address the video RAM and generate timing signals. The video RAM is 2K*16 bits. some bits of which are used as attributes, but 11 bitsd (I think) are used as the 'chracter'. This addresses an area of the main DRAM which cotnains the character patters. Now, you can use that as a convnetional text display. Assume you only have 256 chracters, load the patterns into the right bit fo the main memroy, nad put the character codes in the 2K video RAM. But note that 11 bits is enough to have a differenc chracter pattern at each fo the 80*24 loctaions on the screen. So you can store a differnet chracter code in each location and then use the appropriate area of the main memory to control idividuyal pixels on the display. I think the Sirius/Victor 9000 does the same thing. -tony