5 Nov
2007
5 Nov
'07
9:21 p.m.
On 6 Nov 2007 at 17:13, Ethan Dicks wrote:
I would consider that after the MC68000 entered the
home market,
wrapped up as a Mac, an Atari, or an Amiga, the only "home" machine
that still booted to text mode was the PC, which they still do.
A waste of hardware since the first VGA. The old "backward
compatibility" business wherein an application can stuff alpha data
into a memory mapped buffer I suspect. Did the IBM PGC emulate text
mode in software or did it also use dedicated character-generation
hardware? My O&A isn't within handy reach...
Low-end home wapro boxes kept using text mode for a very long time
after the 68K home systems came out. But maybe that's stretching the
notion of "home machine".
Cheers,
Chuck