int10h.org - VileR's blog

It's not every day that a yet-unknown set of PC-family BIOS ROMs surfaces after 4 decades in obscurity.

Those four 'bonus' screen fonts in the ROM BIOS of the IBM PS/2 Model 30-286 (and friends) have some more history behind them than was uncovered in my earlier post.

Some answers emerge about IBM's original 'Nordic' code page for the PC.

Imagine you're in South Africa or Brazil, and one day you wake up to find that your country has wedged itself firmly in the Nordics.

You might have picked up on two recurring topics around these parts: ancient PC games, and ancient bitmap fonts.

This is what happens when you don't resist the urge to poke at old games with sharp sticks.

This was publicly released over a month ago, so it's old news by now; but the IBM PC has waited over 4 decades to be emulated quite this faithfully, so what's a little holdup between friends?

We've seen how the MC6845 CRTC can produce unintended, 'phantom' vertical sync pulses if R7 is rewritten during active display time.

A dive into an obscure hardware glitch in the 6845 CRTC chip, which has to do with register rewriting, and only seems to really have a noticeable effect on IBM CGA boards (so far).

CGA can output 16 digital RGBI colors, and there's a well-known standard palette which translates them to (s)RGB values - but that palette isn't a very good approximation of the colors you actually get on IBM's original CGA monitor.

Another old riddle bites the dust: why did some 16-bit ISA PS/2 machines have an extra set of four alternate fonts tucked away in their firmware?

A little hack of Space Commanders from last year gets an unexpected (and awesome) makeover, courtesy of someone else's talent.

Believe it or not, it's possible to transport ancient CRTs across continents, even with today's shipping services pulling out all the stops on incompetence.

CRTs get all the retro-hype, but oldschool portable PCs had slimmer alternatives: monochrome/grayscale LCDs, orange plasma panels, and yellow electroluminescent ones.

As Kermit the Frog and his IBM 5151 display once commiserated with Greta Thunberg, "it's not easy being green".

...or: Who needs shaders - just do it the slow way!

Yet another load of pixellated character sets, converted from classic PC-related hardware for your enjoyment.

Code projects are now hosted on GitHub, so you all get shiny new download links to match.

To make up for the 4-year holdup, it's quite a big update: 133 new font families (from 52 different sources), 3 new variants for each font (.ttf w/embedded bitmaps, aspect-corrected .ttf, and .woff for the web), and a revamped website to hold all of these…

A tool for quick and painless file transfers from host to guest.

A new font editor for DOS: dual tab interface, clipboard, block operations, 40/80 columns, 8/9-dot mode.

Does VGA 40-column text mode hurt your eyeballs and disfigure the games you play?

Using a TV set as a CGA display device has its issues, especially horizontal centering and color in 80-column text mode.

A few techniques derived by trial-and-error, and some obvious pitfalls to avoid.

Yet another go at converting the pre-GUI PC's most iconic typeface into a TrueType font.

How to migrate away from a centralized, restricted platform and keep your cool and your "link juice" (disclaimer: retainment of cool may vary).

A fully-equipped IBM 5160 braves the rigors of international shipping and gets here in one piece (just barely).

My present: 'Sorry Ass' - a 512-byte boot sector version of Bill Gates' DONKEY, the infamous demonstration game included with DOS and BASIC 1.0.

A little bit of reverse-engineering fun.

After giving Keen 4's CGA version a 16-color composite overhaul, I figured I'd have a go at the next episode.

This game is a pretty impressive piece of CGA programming, but there's one thing it doesn't do: exploit NTSC quirks to get 16 colors on a TV/composite monitor, instead of the familiar 4.

Historical exhibit: a set of 25 floppy disks documenting IBM's creation of an in-house bitmap typeface for the RT PC project (code-named Olympiad).

An archeological riddle: these very early public domain games all have similar title screens, which say "IBM" although they were clearly homebrew creations.

Presenting the world's biggest collection of classic text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from the DOS-era IBM PCs and compatibles.

Is it possible to get Windows to display TrueType pixelfonts in a crisp bitmap-like fashion?

Compact just like Windows' Terminal font, but based on the EGA/VGA text mode character sets.

Most Apple ][ emulator screenshots out there completely misrepresent the color and resolution of that machine's composite video output.

IBM officially discouraged PC programmers from exploiting hardware-specific tricks, since that came at the expense of compatibility.

Another installment on CGA display tricks - covering the final version of 8088 MPH, determining the model of your CGA card in wetware, the extended 1024-color palettes supported by both models, and some artistic considerations.

Not so new anymore.

Can you take the original IBM PC color graphics board, and force it to display 32 times as many colors as it's officially capable of?

Back in 1981, this was part of the original set of software available for the IBM PC on launch.

The lowdown on why this game can be so frustrating to play with the keyboard - in the wrong circumstances.

Mapping out all four levels and 127 rooms of this maze shooter - specifically, the IBM PC version.

An exercise in taking "modern" graphics software and dragging it kicking and screaming back to the glorious days of clean, simple, 2 bits per pixel raster graphics.

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