25, 28, 30, 43 and 50 line text modes in DOS

Eric Auer <[email protected]> Thu, 14 Nov 2002 00:17:18 +0100 (MET)
Newsgroups gmane.os.freedos.devel
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hi, you may remember me saying:
ZENO is useless for FreeDOS, FreeDOS already uses fast BIOS TTY.
For TURBO3 holds the same. NANSI will, however, speed up your DOS
screen output even with FreeDOS :-).
So what next? Have more lines of text on the screen, for more scrolling
before scrolling away (by the way, which "backscroll buffer" drivers do
you usually use to scroll back to stuff that would normally have scrolled
away already?)...

I just have this in my fdconfig.sys:
SCREEN=0x12
ECHO 8x8 font (0x12) gives us 50 lines of text :-)

Other options are 0x11 and 0x14, for 25 and 28 lines. If you have
EGA, you get 21, 25 and 43 instead of 25, 28 and 50 lines. But for
a special bonus, have my 30 line VGA mode. Not too big, not too small:

http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~eric/stuff/soft/specials/ vga30.zip

This is no TSR, it will just turn your screen into that mode. As soon
as some program resets the screen mode to 25 or 50 lines, you will
probably want to run VGA30 again. This is derived from my readings of
the Linux kernel sources. Have fun!

PS: Should not damage anything, but if your screen starts to smoke,
better reset to get back to 80x25... But is as far as I know a very
ordinary 31.25kHz mode that all screens should show fine.

Eric