Re: New VGA console coming

[Vojtech P. <vo...@su...>]

On Sat, Aug 26, 2000 at 11:17:56PM -0400, James Simmons wrote:

>    Now for the next step in the evolution of the console system. Well I
> made a discovery today. Their exist vga cards (JEGA, AX-VGA) that can 
> display asian characters. I also discovered some old BIOS calls that might
> lead to figuring out if double byte fonts could be supported. The BIOS
> call int 10h, ah=18h, al=0,1 which can get/set a font pattern. This leads
> to me to believe it might be possible for VGA to support double byte
> fonts. This of course would mean a rethinking of how the shadow buffer
> should be done. Any ideas anyone?

Well, it might be possible, though I never have seen a card that would
be capable of that. Even the version of Ralf Brown's interrupt list
doesn't say anything about that.

What might be interesting, though, is using the feature that int 10, ah
11, al 3 allows. It can be easily set via registers as well.
512-character font could be very useful for Unicode mappings.

Another cute feature possible would be to use the font page in the VGA
card (be it 256 or 512 characters) as a cache of letter images, and only
use those that are displayed on screen. This would allow using huge
fonts (> 512 chars), assuming that one never uses all the letters at
once. Full Unicode support, for example. 

-- 
Vojtech Pavlik
SuSE Labs