Recent content by VileR

A lot of contemporary IBM-published software titles seemed to go with blue backgrounds in their IBM-branded installers or launchers. How much that choice correlated with the "Big Blue" nickname is anyone's guess. I'd say that's semi-plausible, because the convention of "intensified text =...

Is that terribly different from COPY's concatenation support in the form of COPY [/b] A+B+[...] C, other than the syntax? I don't recall whether COPY supported this from the very start, but it's been there for as long as I can remember. To me the problem with COPY (starting with DOS 2.x...

For one, I'm pretty sure that code page 874 (Thai) used combining glyphs. Those smaller characters in columns D and E are diacritics that go either above or below the letter forms, and there are too many possible combinations for an 8-bit encoding to work without this. That made it all kinds of...

....While yogh / ȝogh / Ȝ got replaced with "z", even though its sound was much closer to "y". (ȝ being told about þ)

The first step towards updating that font collection would be to automate more of the process, as I think I mentioned before... and switching encodings is straightforward enough to automate (Fontforge's Python support is implemented rather strangely, but it works). In particular, it shouldn't...

@mwalden: welcome, nice to see ya here! Likely because IBM itself never really made up its mind. It clearly looks like a Greek beta in the CGA, MDA, EGA, and PC Convertible fonts, and the 1986 'rev. 0' of the PS/2 MCGA/VGA firmware still had that representation, but the following year's rev...

Awesome, appreciate it. Attached is the python code I came up with to unpack the full font sets from the ROM... maybe someone will find this educational.

See here - https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/linux-cpmtools-on-images-created-by-imagedisk.56696/

Excellent- no rush, and thank you. There should be a few dozen supported charsets, but the only ones I'm really unclear about are DEC KOI-8 Cyrillic (no character map available), and ISO Latin-Greek (of which some glyphs appear not to be in the ROM). The rest are relatively well documented...

Well done - do either of the VT525s power up with correct video output? (I believe this model takes common VGA monitors?) Thanks to your ROM dump, I've extracted the various font sizes for my little typography project (funny compression scheme there)... but unlike earlier models, the actual...

This was possible with specialized (multisync/multi-standard) monitors which could be set to interpret the signals this way, *if* the software bothered to support this specifically. A handful of games still did it: I wouldn't say that, because many games used EGA-specific tricks even at the...

It's probably a stretch to assume that IBM made a deliberate choice to match the Apple color selection (or anything else in particular). In both cases, the colors are just an artifact of the method - pushing out white pixels at 4 times the frequency of the NTSC color carrier. As long as the...

Yes. That seems to be how the IBM 5271 generates its 8 colors, for instance (like the color 3270 terminals): the monitor nominally accepts digital R, G, and B, but internally transforms the results to a palette that's quite different from a 1:1 mapping of the input channels to the electron...

Beauty's in the eye of the be(er- )holder, evidently. Looking at that makes me appreciate the true CGA palettes a little more. If you hook up your CGA to the same type of monitor which the Apple II uses (color NTSC), then you get *exactly* the same selection of 16 artifact colors as the Apple...

A budding demo platform? :) Well done! If only the character glyphs in this thing were a bit closer together, maybe you could achieve a convincing semigraphics display, sort of like the PET...