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Running a 80×25 DOS-Style Console Is Possible After All

Here, in classic Goerzen deep dive fashion, is more information than you knew you wanted about a topic you’ve probably never thought of. I found it pretty interesting, because it took me down a rabbit hole of subsystems I’ve never worked with much and a mishmash of 1980s and 2020s tech.

On a multisync monitor, which were common except in the very early days of VGA, the timings could be adjusted which produced logical pixels of different sizes. VGA also supported certain other sizes of characters giving certain other text dimensions, but if I cover all of those, this will explode into a ridiculously more massive page than it already is. As explained in my previous post, proper hardware support for DOS text mode is limited to x86 machines that do not use UEFI.

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