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IBM character ROMs from non-US CGA/MDA cards? (Hebrew / others)

VileR

VileR

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Yeah, it's a long shot but I'm looking for dumps of the character ROMs from early IBM display adapters sold outside of the US.

Looking through my old files, I came across a "HEBREW.COM" program dated 6/1983; it also contains the strings "2.0" and "(C) COPYRIGHT IBM ISRAEL LTD. 1983" (so it predates EGA's full "soft font" support, or later DOS commands like GRAFTABL/CHCP). After you load this TSR, hitting Alt+RShift will switch on right-to-left input mode for Hebrew (a rather primitive implementation... it flips the entire screen, and visibly struggles with the BIOS too). Alt+LShift will switch it back off.

If you happen to be in CGA graphics mode, you'll see actual Hebrew characters as you type. The font data (stored within the .COM) is loaded into the upper half of the ASCII table for graphics modes -- this is the extracted bitmap:
HEBREW_ibm_83.png

Of course, if you're in CGA or MDA text mode, you'll get the hardware ROM font instead. I'm assuming that IBM sold their display adapters with localized character ROMs (as they did elsewhere), and this program relied on such a Hebrew ROM for proper text mode functionality. We used something very similar on our own machine back in the day, but that was just a clone. I'm curious to know whether or not these characters match the contents of IBM's actual ROM.

Long story short: if anyone has access to such a Hebrew character ROM from an IBM card, I'd appreciate a dump. Actually, ROMs from other non-US locales would be nice too.

Thanks!
 

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  • HEBREW_ibm_83.zip
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I have two IBM MDA cards, which were both sold here in the Netherlands I presume... I'm pretty sure they would be standard US ROMs though, but I could dump them to be sure (there are Dutch codepages, keyboard layouts and everything, but I've never seen anyone use them :)).
What I think would interest you more though is a dump from my Commodore PC20-III. Its 40-column mode uses a font that looks more like an Amiga font than the IBM one. Funny thing is, that font is also used in the 8088 MPH intro, because it just grabs the data from the ROM :)
 
Scali said:
I have two IBM MDA cards, which were both sold here in the Netherlands I presume... I'm pretty sure they would be standard US ROMs though, but I could dump them to be sure (there are Dutch codepages, keyboard layouts and everything, but I've never seen anyone use them :)).
Click to expand...
Yeah, Dutch is probably covered well enough by the US/437 font... I guess that would be easy to verify by just taking a quick look at the full ascii table, assuming you have one of those cards in a working system (probably not worth the trouble if you don't). :)

Scali said:
What I think would interest you more though is a dump from my Commodore PC20-III. Its 40-column mode uses a font that looks more like an Amiga font than the IBM one. Funny thing is, that font is also used in the 8088 MPH intro, because it just grabs the data from the ROM :)
Click to expand...
That does sound curious... speaking of the Amiga font, this guy reckons that it was "very likely derived" from the IBM CGA font in the first place (wonder if that's true!)

BTW, in case you're asking yourself why I'm after those fonts: think something like this, except for IBM. ;)
 
Look a PM, I will send you an URL to collection with Russian (Cyrillic) CGA and MDA/Hercules fonts.

There were two popular Cyrillic encodings for PC: one is similar to the ISO-8859-5 (excluding Cyrillic letter YO)
and another is IBM CP866.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_866


Try to find a full distributive of the KEYRUS tool. It contins a nice fullscreen font editor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KeyRus
 
Excellent, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm looking for - thanks a lot. There's even a Cyrillic version of the alternate 'thin' CGA font in there (didn't expect that).
It's interesting to see that there were a few variants with subtle differences... some of them with more attention to detail (like a modified digit '3' to distinguish it from Cyrillic letter Ze):

CGA_MDA.x.png

I guess those charsets were the precursors to CP866, since the encoding is pretty much identical, except that CP866 adds a few more letters.

Does anyone have CGA/MDA/Hercules ROM dumps from other locales? Hebrew, Greek, and Central European would especially help me out. :)
 
I got a dump of the Danish/Norwegian/Portugese font, gathered from a real IBM MDA Font ROM dated somewhere around 1985. This one has the Ø letter, a dotted zero to not confuse the two, and a few additional apostrophes and such on some characters.

It's one of the files in the zip, the other file is the firmware for the IBM Music Feature card.
 

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  • BIOS&ROMS.zip
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  • font.png
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alecv said:
You could find this useful
http://vt100.net/dec/vt220/glyphs
http://www.sensi.org/~svo/glasstty/
It's not from the PC world, but DEC VT-x00 terminals ROM contains alot of hi-quality international fonts optimized for CRT.

Another source is font from the DOS >4.x CodePage definition files (CPI).
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/117850
Click to expand...
That Glass TTY font is along the lines of what I'm working on with these IBM charsets. ;)
I've already extracted the DOS CPI font bitmaps, but those are necessarily EGA/VGA-only -- dumps from CGA/MDA are probably the only way to get "authentic" counterparts for the older standards that didn't support redefinable charsets.

per said:
I got a dump of the Danish/Norwegian/Portugese font, gathered from a real IBM MDA Font ROM dated somewhere around 1985. This one has the Ø letter, a dotted zero to not confuse the two, and a few additional apostrophes and such on some characters.
Click to expand...
Very nice - thanks!
By the way: what is that character at position 0xAB? Looks like a stylized "Q" - can't place that one...
 
Scali said:
What I think would interest you more though is a dump from my Commodore PC20-III. Its 40-column mode uses a font that looks more like an Amiga font than the IBM one. Funny thing is, that font is also used in the 8088 MPH intro, because it just grabs the data from the ROM :)
Click to expand...
Say, does it happen to look like this?

commodore_pc10iii_318085-05.u201.png

This exists in both the PC-I and the PC-10 series, so it's likely to be the same in the PC-20... it's just the lower ASCII though, so I'm assuming that the rest comes from somewhere else.
 
el_VR said:
Say, does it happen to look like this?

View attachment 26747

This exists in both the PC-I and the PC-10 series, so it's likely to be the same in the PC-20... it's just the lower ASCII though, so I'm assuming that the rest comes from somewhere else.
Click to expand...

My ATI Small Wonder video card had that same weirdo font in CGA graphics mode. I've seen it in other clones as well. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to make the graphics mode font totally different from the text mode font!
 
el_VR said:
Say, does it happen to look like this?

View attachment 26747

This exists in both the PC-I and the PC-10 series, so it's likely to be the same in the PC-20... it's just the lower ASCII though, so I'm assuming that the rest comes from somewhere else.
Click to expand...

Yup, that's the one!
The PC20-III is exactly the same computer as the PC10-III (the motherboard even says 'PC10-III'), it just came with a 20 MB HDD, where the PC10-III was HDD-less.
The Commodore Colt is also the same motherboard, just a slightly different front on the case. So I suppose it will also have this font.
 
vwestlife said:
My ATI Small Wonder video card had that same weirdo font in CGA graphics mode. I've seen it in other clones as well. For some reason they thought it was a good idea to make the graphics mode font totally different from the text mode font!
Click to expand...
Sounds like it's just the 8x8 font from the machine's BIOS then - that's where the text in CGA graphics modes normally comes from, since the character ROM on the card is only used in text modes. Any IBM-compatible BIOS would only have the lower 128 chars there (which is why you need GRAPHICS.COM or similar to get the rest).

Did you have that ATI card in a machine with a Phoenix BIOS, by any chance? I had a quick look at a couple of those (off of modem7's site) and they have that same font... and since those Commodore PCs were also based on Phoenix ROMs (as far as I can tell), that probably explains where it came from.

OTOH, it looks like ATI also enjoyed using their own quirky fonts in later cards (at least the EGA/VGA Wonder and Mach series). My silly little project is starting to get a wee bit out of control... :shock:
 
I have an ATi Small Wonder in my Philips computer, and afaik it has the IBM font there (the machine does not have a Phoenix BIOS I think, unlike the Commodore).
I could put that card in the Commodore sometime and see what happens.
 
I have dumped the font ROM from a ATI small wonder Rev 2 I have as well, just give me a sec and I'll dig it up...

... There!

This is for hardware modes. For CGA graphics mode, the BIOS font would still be used (but that's BIOS dependent and not graphics card dependent).
 

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  • Untitled3.png
    Untitled3.png
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  • ATI Small Wonder Graphics Solution Font.zip
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el_VR said:
Did you have that ATI card in a machine with a Phoenix BIOS, by any chance? I had a quick look at a couple of those (off of modem7's site) and they have that same font... and since those Commodore PCs were also based on Phoenix ROMs (as far as I can tell), that probably explains where it came from.
Click to expand...

Yes, I had the ATI Small Wonder in a Packard Bell PB 500, with Phoenix BIOS.
 
Scali said:
I could put that card in the Commodore sometime and see what happens.
Click to expand...
Well, I'm fairly sure that you'd simply get the Commodore/Phoenix font in CGA graphics modes and the ATI ROM font (pretty much identical to IBM's) elsewhere. So there are probably far more interesting experiments that could be done with that card instead ;)

per said:
I have dumped the font ROM from a ATI small wonder Rev 2 I have as well, just give me a sec and I'll dig it up...

... There!
Click to expand...
Ah, so that's the charset it uses for those weirdo 132-column modes (top left). thanks for that as well!
(Not that I fully understand how 132x25 would work on a 5151, given the 8-line chars, but I guess that card does live up to its name..)
 
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