Yet Another VT-100 Emulator

[Jim Leonard]

Dave Dunfield wrote:
> Not likely - as far as I know there are no standard PC text
> video modes that give 132 columns.  

VESA supports querying card capabilities (including extended text modes) 
and also setting such modes through the BIOS, no bit-banging required. 
Most cards made after 1996 have VESA BIOS built-in; for cards made 
1993-1996, the old Scitech Display Doctor TSR should work fine.

For cards made before 1993, the card manufacturers usually provided a 
small TSR that provided VESA 1.0 or 1.2 (should still have a few 
extended text modes in there).  The earliest VESA TSR I'd ever seen is 
one from 1989 for Paradise chipsets.  YMMV.

> I've not done a bit-mapped version (that would be a lot of
> changes to my emulator). 

I would highly recommend staying away from manual rasterization; if a 
card can do 1024x768, it can do 132x25 or 132x50.

> Another thing I've added in this most recent version is that I
> came up with technique when using a VGA card to not only load
> a custom font which gives you all the VT-100 graphic characters,
> but also to enable all of the VT-100 attributes (Bold, Underline,
> Blink and Reverse) in any and all combinations.

Ah, so you are using VGA's capability to store multiple fonts and 
bank-switch between them?  Or something more hideous, like changing the 
font every 16 scanlines?  ;-)
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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