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8x19 Text Mode Font Origins
I was recently made aware of something that I had noticed before, but never paid much attention to. Consider this screenshot of a BIOS POST screen: VGA text modes usually use 720×400 resolution and 8×16 fonts (expanded to 9×16).
For the sake of clarity: The screenshot was taken by digitizing the analog VGA output of a physical AN430TX board with an integrated ATI Rage 3D graphics chip. Reading the Technical Product Specification of the AN430TX board led to a realization that the entire flash is mapped in physical memory just below 4GB. In fact as soon as the system starts POSTing add-on adapters, the BIOS switches to a regular VGA text mode, and also does that before attempting to boot from disk.
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