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I was going to have this as the defaut video mode in my os but when i tried it on microsoft virtual pc it didnt work it set the video mode differnently producing a nice problem with scrolling and new lines

so is it mainly just microsoft virtual pc that has this problem or is 90x60 rarely supported

You certainly can't assume it's always supported... but I don't have stats on what percentage of PCs support it (depends on your target audience, as well).

--Jeff

My experience is that it isn't support to much, especially with MS stuff. I do use it if it is available though. You may want to look at more reliable modes. There is one that is 132 x 60 too which you may be interested.

Yes but this is VBE text mode, I suggest you to use standard VGA 80x25 mode which will work on evry PC.

agreed -- if you stick with standard, it will be gaurenteed to work on all computers/video controllers -- but not if you don't

even winXP (which uses standard VGA convention to use higher-than-VGA resolutions (which is not garanteed to work on all controllers) in safe-mode, can fall back to standard VGA if the user requests it to)

Why not go into graphics mode and draw text onto a bitmap? Then you can make it any font you want as well as having as many lines as possible on the screen.

because i am wanting to make a afaik never made or designed a text user interface using text to make it "graphical"

to show what i mean

look at my alpha design
http://jouleos.byethost33.com/TextUI.jpg

[image]http://jouleos.byethost33.com/TextUI.jpg[/image]

As was mentioned in a previous email; this truly isn't a new concept. Not suggesting it's a bad idea... in fact, I like the idea... but it's been done before, several times.

Take a look at:
http://tvision.sourceforge.net/tvQNX-pterm-photon.jpg

Which shows how TurboVision used to look (Borland's text GUI). This, of course, is a port, not the original, but it looks identical (ignore the fact that its running in an X window... it is, truly, a text-only application).

--Jeff

yes but that isn't an OS though is it

that is quite impresive though

my idea is quite simple without color implementation on a large scale

btw
are you sure the background is text

Take a look at Turbo Assembler (I think it is free on the net) and you can get an idea of what that background is all about. Also, it may be helpful to look up changing fonts and the associated bitmaps so that you can make your own designs on characters etcetera. For instance, there is a dissassembler out there (the name escapes me at the moment) that uses two letters to make the copyright symbol ? like you see here. FYI: when DOS was huge OSes didn't provide a windowing mechanism for programs to use so there were a lot of implementations within individual software programs.

I have plans on implementing a text based system on my OS, however I am not to the CLI yet so I haven't worked on it in quite sometime. But that is all about to change on Monday...<wink>

hckr83 wrote: btw
are you sure the background is text

Yes. Take a look at the extended ascii codes (above 127) that most (all that I've seen) bios' setup at boot. You can spot all the characters used to make up this text gui.

smiddy makes a good point as well -- you can change the font table such that characters make up funky effects like rounded corners, etc.

Remember, you have 256 potential glyphs per 'character'... not just letters, numbers and the few symbols that appear on your keyboard.

--Jeff