Does anyone
know if any of the more modern (ie: VGA) cards support
enhanced
132 column text modes?
I think this is a "maybe". At [
http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/textmode.html ], there's a link to a
program that scans for a series of 132-column VESA text modes. It couldn't
find any on the laptop I tried it on (no surprise), but apparently there are
a number of NVIDIA cards that support these modes. I don't know what how
the layout compares to the character/attribute pairs for 80-column modes,
but here's the Pascal code they use to try entering the modes:
Thanks! - that was useful.
Turns out many of the cards I have support a 132x25 column video mode which
is laid out exactly the same as the 80 column modes except for being 264 bytes
per line instead of 160 (character and attribute pairs).
For my ATI cards mode 35 (23h) seems to work on most of them.
I've just posted a new version of LAPTALK, which supports 132 column mode.
In order to enable it, you must configure the 132 column video mode under
"General Parameters". 0-255 are standard BIOS modes, and 256-511 are VESA
modes (sorry, but you have to set the mode in decimal). It also supports
set/reset "column" (132 column) mode now (if the mode is configured).
I've also added a small
FIND132.COM utility to the package which helps
find that elusive 132 column video mode. I've also added a 132 column test
to the
VTEST.COM utility,
Other improvements in this version:
- Improved the keyboard mapping function, including a visual layout
showing where the 103 keycodes I support occur on a generic keyboard.
- "auto-repeat" is now configurable, and set/reset mode works.
- Configurable Device Attributes value sent back to host.
Dave
--
dave06a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools:
www.dunfield.com
com Collector of vintage computing equipment:
http://www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/index.html
