6 ms·
It's an old/good trick. The linux kernel offers an ioctl to set the font tables, and has for years. I think the kms people want to remove them which is a little
by geocar 1mo ago
It's an old/good trick. The linux kernel offers an ioctl to set the font tables, and has for years. I think the kms people want to remove them which is a little sad.
Until then you can also use a tool called SVGATextMode to set the registers and get 80x50 or even a 160x100. I still think text-mode is great. I don't know very much about FreeBSD; I last used OpenBSD almost 20 years ago. Before Linux my unix was Solaris or SCO.
These days, I have a tegra (nvidia arm64) system and it still has a x86 vga bios in there(!!!) so linux actually ships an x86 emulator to "read" the outb/w instructions. Amazing.
- burnt-resistor 1mo agoCool. I really worry about emulation failing to have options to be faithful to real hardware limitations or faithfully reproduce bugs and artifacts of particular steppings and versions. On real hardware, I/O port instructions often require delay cycles before other operations can proceed. VGA monitors had an overscan area that could be set to a specific color in the palette, which is rarely emulated. Video tearing is rarely emulated properly. Snow and garbage that happen between video mode changes or boot cycles too. And, where's the degauss button? ;-P
- geocar 27d agoI remember FastTracker needed the overscan to tell you if you were in Edit mode or not (or I guess you could just try keyjamming). I think I saw someone announced a clone recently and I noticed they didn't implement that. Now that you say this I wonder if their only experience was in an emulator. But we still have snow: remember rowhammer? Basically snow on purpose. So I'm not so worried that kids will lose knowledge of analog effects just because we don't have CRTs anymore.