I was recently made aware of something that I had noticed before, but never paid much attention to. Consider this screenshot of a BIOS POST screen:
VGA text modes usually use 720×400 resolution and 8×16 fonts (expanded to 9×16). The above screenshot uses 640×480 resolution (VGA graphics), but it is with a high degree a certainty a text mode, using a custom 8×19 font. The BIOS is a Phoenix BIOS 4.0 Release 6.0, running on an Intel Anchorage (AN430TX) board.
For the sake of clarity: The screenshot was taken by digitizing the analog VGA output of a physical AN430TX board with an integrated ATI Rage 3D graphics chip. The VGA connector was plugged into a Lantronix Spider KVM, which was used to save the screenshot. It is not a screenshot of an emulated system.
Some of the earliest examples of boards with an 8×19 font were reportedly Intel Anchorage AN430TX (see above) and Intel Atlanta AL430LX (one of the first AGP-capable boards), both released in 1997. These were probably the first boards using Phoenix BIOS after Intel had been using AMI BIOS for several years, a fact which may or may not be relevant.
The OS/2 Museum happens to own both the AL440LX and AN430TX boards. And as the screenshot above indicates, the AN430TX certainly used an 8×19 font, at least in the final (P10) BIOS update. For reference, here’s what the first BIOS setup screen looks like:
The obvious question is, when did this font show up? The P10 BIOS is from September 10, 1998. I have older BIOS versions, the oldest being update P06 from August 26, 1997. Is the 8×19 font there?
Decoding Phoenix BIOS
That seemingly simple question led to a bit of an adventure. There are tools for decoding Phoenix BIOS images (such as phnxdeco). But phnxdeco has no idea what to do with the Intel flash update files, which are split into several chunks. For the AN430TX, which uses a 2Mbit (256KB) flash, there’s a roughly 64K file called .BIO, another called .BI1, .BI2, and a smaller .BI3 file.
Gluing the files together after removing the obvious headers did not produce satisfactory results. Dumping the soldered flash chip is not that easy either.
There is another Phoenix BIOS decoder called phoedeco. This decoder actually understands the Intel flash update files… but I still had no luck.
Reading the Technical Product Specification of the AN430TX board led to a realization that the entire flash is mapped in physical memory just below 4GB. So I wrote a simple utility to dump the last 256KB of physical memory to a file. That turned out to be very useful.
For one thing, the phoedeco utility was actually able to take my own ROM dump apart:
M:\AN430TX\bios>phoedecw AN430TX2.ROM foo
PHOEDECO * V.K. * 1998.04.02..2006.01.13
AN430TX2.ROM
Position packed C unpacked type target filename
-------- -------- -- -------- ------------ -------- -- ------------
000FEF15 0000107A 02 00001860 Display - -> DISPLAY0.dec
000FC44C 00002AAE 02 00005D80 Template - -> TEMPLAT0.dec
000F9227 0000320A 02 00004820 Suspend - -> MISER__0.dec
000F851F 00000CED 02 00007AE2 BIOSCode 000F851E +
000F0000 000013EC 02 +
000D920D 00002DE2 02 -> BIOSCOD0.dec
000F13F5 0000710E 00 0000710E ROMExec 000F1410 => ROMEXEC0.dec
000E453E 00003A61 02 0000893E Setup - -> SETUP__0.edi
000DBFF8 0000852B 02 0000E000 OpROM - -> OPROM__0.rom
000D292A 000068C8 02 00009580 BIOSCode.1 000E7E90 -> BIOSCOD1.dec
000D0046 000028C9 02 0000D700 BIOSCode.2 00070000 +
000C8889 00007728 02 -> BIOSCOD2.dec
-------- -------- -- -------- ------------ -------- -- ------------
000E9000 00001000 -- 00001000 55 AA ROM block 000E9000.rom
000EA000 00002000 -- 00002000 55 AA ROM block 000EA000.rom
000C0000 00007669 02 0000FF46 Strings - -> STRINGS0.str
000FDFF0 00002010 -- 00002010 noncompressed noncomp.rom
000C7684 0002897C -- 0002897C remaining unprocessed remain.rom
More importantly, the dump showed me how the .BIO files actually end up in flash memory. And this allowed me to use phoedeco to decode older flash updates. Notice the values entered for the addresses:
M:\AN430TX\BIOS06>phoedecw P06-0062.BIO foo
PHOEDECO * V.K. * 1998.04.02..2006.01.13
P06-0062.BIO [$C6000] ? $D0000
P06-0062.BI1 [$D6000] ? $C0000
P06-0062.BI2 [$E6000] ? $F0000
P06-0062.BI3 [$F6000] ? $E0000
Position packed C unpacked type target filename
-------- -------- -- -------- ------------ -------- -- ------------
000FE974 0000161B 02 00007CD7 Display - -> DISPLAY0.dec
000FBDBA 00002B9F 02 00006010 Template - -> TEMPLAT0.dec
...
The Intel update files have headers that show the “logical area size” of the combined set. The phoedeco utility tries to align the contents such that the last byte ends up at address 0xFFFFF. But with the AN430TX that does not work, for two reasons.
One reason is that the flash update on this board does not rewrite everything. It leaves in place a boot block, which presumably increases the chances of recovering from a flash update gone bad. It also leaves in place some areas of flash, such as the one which holds the board’s serial number.
The other reason is that adjacent 64K blocks end up being swapped. I have no idea what that’s good for, but they do. This may have something to do with BIOS recovery (which is documented as not working on the AN430TX); a jumper on the board supposedly swaps around flash contents, presumably to map the recovery BIOS to where the standard BIOS would normally be.
Be as it may, mapping the .BIO/.BI1/.BI2/.BI3 files to addresses 0xD0000, 0xC0000, 0xF0000, and 0xE0000 (in that order) allows phoedeco to decode AN430TX BIOS updates.
After decoding the P06 BIOS from August 26, 1997, I was able to locate the 8×19 font in the STRINGS module. But it didn’t look quite the way I expected.
Reduced BIOS Character Set
Presumably in an effort to save a few bytes, the font is encoded in a rather interesting format. The first 128 characters look as one would expect and correspond to code page 437 or 850. The second 128 characters… well, for one thing, there aren’t other 128 characters. There are only about 30-40 or so. And they do not follow any known encoding, although their order appears to follow CP850. How can this possibly work?
That’s easy. Remember, the font is part of the STRINGS module, which contains all user-visible strings in the BIOS, in several languages (English, German, French in case of AN430TX BIOS P06). It appears that whoever produced the strings module (Intel?) collected all the strings, quite possibly coded using CP850, determined which characters in the 128-255 range are actually used, threw out all the unused ones character from the font, and then re-coded the strings to correspond to the new ad-hoc encoding.
For example the German word “ausführen” would normally have the character ü coded as 0x81 (CP850 or CP437). But in this particular instance of an Intel board BIOS, it is coded as 0x80 because the preceding letter (Ç) that normally occupies code point 0x80 was left out.
Since the text strings and the font are stored in the same module and clearly must be used together, this mechanism works reliably.
As a corollary, any strings that contain code points outside the 0-127 range must be displayed using the included 8×19 font in order to be properly legible. But that’s not a problem because the strings are generally used either on the BIOS POST screen or in the BIOS setup, and both of those are under the control of the BIOS.
Intel Boards and 8×19 fonts
For the sake of completeness, I decided to check my AL440LX board as well. The default boot screen revealed nothing:
The BIOS setup, on the other hand, conformed to the expectations. The font used by the setup screen looks exactly like the one on the AN430TX board:
When one skips the graphical logo, it’s not difficult to see why the font looks the same:
The Intel AN430TX and AL440LX boards (both released in 1997) use the same PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0, and also use the same font. Not too surprising.
The question is, where did the font come from? Phoenix? Intel? Somewhere else? I started looking at other 1990s Intel boards.
Older Intel Pentium boards from 1994-1996 all appear to have AMI BIOS and do not seem to use the 8×19 font at all. They just use whatever VGA text mode font the display adapter provides. See for example the Atlantis/EV board description here.
The next board I tried was the infamous Cape Cod CC820 from 1999. As on the AL440LX, the default boot screen says very little:
The BIOS setup, on the other hand, is much more revealing. And again, it shows a 640×480 text mode using the 8×19 font. By all appearances it is the exact same font used on the AN430TX and AL440LX:
The POST screen is somewhat interesting. No mention of Phoenix, or AMI for that matter. But strings inside the BIOS as well as Intel’s documentation reveal that the CC820 board used AMI BIOS again.
Which means that Intel used Phoenix and AMI BIOSes with the same font.
Now I needed to focus on older Intel boards, released in the second half of 1996 or late 1997. There was a good chance that the AN430TX was not the oldest board with an 8×19 font.
Unfortunately Intel was extremely prolific at that time, and released a dozen or more boards every year.
Examining available information about the VS440FX board (which came out around May 1996) suggested that it still used regular VGA text modes.
TC430HX and PR440FX
The TC430HX (Tucson) and PR440FX (Providence) boards seemed to be worth checking out.
The TC430HX came out around July 1996, PR440FX in August. And screenshots of the PR440FX looked rather interesting. The boards appear to be using an 8×19 font, but a different font. For one thing, the zero was slashed instead of dotted:
It is undoubtedly an 8×19 font, but a markedly different one. For comparison, this is what the BIOS setup screen looks like on the TC430HX:
Digging through TC430HX BIOS update from September 1996 I was able to establish that yes, an 8×19 font was certainly there, and yes, it was very different from the one used in the 1997 boards. These boards of course used AMI BIOS, so perhaps AMI had an 8×19 font different from Phoenix?
PD440FX
Then I came across the PD440FX (Portland) board. The PD440FX still used the old Pentium Pro 440FX chipset, but it was actually a Slot 1 Pentium II board from April 1997 (same as the AN430TX).
An eBay listing for a PD440FX board showed this rather interesting screenshot:
Compare that with the above screenshot of TC430HX. That certainly looks like the newer 8×19 font, but the screen layout is otherwise extremely similar.. But wait, there’s more:
So the PD440FX board uses AMI BIOS, not Phoenix. But it sports the same 8×19 font that the PhoenixBIOS-equipped Intel boards used. Which suggests (though doesn’t prove) that the font came from Intel, and not Phoenix or AMI.
Back to the Future
On the other end of the spectrum, Intel clearly liked that 8×19 font and kept using it for a long time. This is the BIOS setup of a 2012 Intel DX79SR Stormville board:
This is an 800×600 graphics mode–at some point Intel switched from text modes to graphics. But it is undeniably the same font. The DX79SR was one of the last Intel boards that used text-based setup. Notice that this is a BIOS update from 2014, and that the BIOS identifier starts with SIX79 (which should be read as SI-X79, not SIX-79) because it was originally used with the DX79SI (Siler) board, a slightly older but nearly identical predecessor of the Stormville board.
The final Intel board generation before the desktop board group was shut down used GUI-style “Visual BIOS” and the text was quite different. However…
The above screenshot shows the EFI shell on a 2013 Intel DQ87PG Spring Cave board. That certainly looks like the same font… now part of EFI.
Timeline
With all the above data points in hand, let’s try putting together a rough timeline:
- Intel boards up to about the first half of 1996 used regular VGA text mode with 8×16 (9×16) fonts (AMI BIOS)
- Intel boards from circa the second half of 1996 used an 8×19 font with a slashed zero and 640×480 text modes (AMI BIOS)
- In the first half of 1997, Intel started using a different 8×19 font with a dotted zero (AMI BIOS and Phoenix BIOS)
- By 1999, Intel was back to AMI BIOS, but still used the same 8×19 font with a dotted zero
- Intel kept using the same font in their boards until about 2012 or 2013 when Visual BIOS replaced text-based setup
- The same 8×19 was used in at least some EFI implementations
The 8×19 font (not the actual bitmaps but the 8×19 resolution) eventually made it to the UEFI specification. UEFI 2.1 (2007) added a Human Interface Infrastructure (HII) section and defined 8×19 as the standard “narrow” fixed font size (UEFI 2.1 section 27.2.7, Fonts), with double-wide 16×19 resolution used for CJK glyphs.
The rationale was probably the same that led Intel to using these fonts a decade earlier. 8×19 fonts enable standard 80×25 text using a basic VGA 640×480 resolution. This works well on flat panels which cannot dynamically change resolution like analog monitors.
8×19 fonts were also used on Asian DBCS systems (e.g. DOS/V) a long time ago. The reason was more or less the same in that the systems were forced to run in VGA graphics mode (640×480) in order to render CJK glyphs, and 8×19 fonts were effectively the only option to support standard 80×25 text on these systems.
Open Questions
There were OEM systems that used 8×19 fonts for regular text modes, such as the Cirrus Logic Stingray. I believe this was effectively a failed attempt; although the 8×19 fonts were a great fit for flat panels, there was too much software which assumed standard 8×16 fonts and relied on that to render, say, a “graphical” mouse cursor in text modes.
For that reason, the Intel boards with 8×19 fonts make absolutely no attempt to use these beyond POST. In fact as soon as the system starts POSTing add-on adapters, the BIOS switches to a regular VGA text mode, and also does that before attempting to boot from disk. For systems that use a graphical logo, the system switches to a standard text mode whenever going out of logo mode. When it’s safe to use the graphical logo it’s safe to use 8×19 text, and vice versa.
The obvious remaining question is, who came up with 8×19 fonts for BIOS use? Was it really Intel? Or was it someone else? Note that the Intel boards were used by many OEMs (including but not limited to AST, Dell, Gateway, HP, Micron, Packard Bell) so just because an OEM system uses an 8×19 font doesn’t mean there isn’t Intel behind it.
It was really a pain to support these non-standard(8×11, 8×19) fonts in a cyrillic display driver.
Well, it was pretty simple for video mode change – just check BDA.fontheight and load the corresponding font, if it exists, or the closest available. But for character generator functions (int10/11xx), it was PITA. Obviously, there were no standard subfuncs for non-standard fonts. So you have to cycle through int10/111x funcs at startup(*), download font from the chargen memory, cycle through int10/1130/xx subfuncs, and compare returned fonts with downloaded ones.
*) This takes a long time and with unpleasant side effects of screen flickerings, so it was usually done only once, and the results were used until the video bios checksum changed.
Do you remember what systems used such fonts? I don’t think I’ve ever seen it “in the wild” (outside of the BIOS), and I’m pretty sure it was precisely because of the compatibility issues.
I still have some notes, nothing too helpful, unfortunately. One is about 6100v (laptop?), which replaces 8×16 font with 8×19. Second is “TVGA: 10/1108-9: 8×11, 9×11”. I wasn’t able google anything meaningful for tvga keyword, though.
In Viler’s retro font pack, which has been created using DOS and BIOS dumps, there is a font called “AST Premium” that supposedly originates to AST Premium Exec. Which I believe was quite an early machine. It is an 8×19 font, quite similar to Intel’s one, but definitely different enough. I regularly use the font in my terminal windows, but I admit that I like Intel’s one better 🙂 Would be perfect to have it covered in the retro pack as well as a Unicode TTF font.
Here’s the link to GitHub: https://github.com/viler-int10h/vga-text-mode-fonts/blob/master/FONTS.TXT
And here’s the link to the preview: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/?2#ast
Laptops are where I’d most expect to see 8×19 fonts. Especially on circa pre-1995 laptops that had a 640×480 screen which simply could not display normal VGA text mode (720×400) all that well. The 8×19 font was a far better fit.
TVGA normally stands for Trident VGA… and here we go: https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?trident_8x11
Excellent sleuthing work. Vendors of system/video BIOS families seem to have been rather promiscuous with the contents included (fonts as well), so it can be a headache to establish what came from where, but this timeline here looks about right.
Here’s some more information about these Intel/AMI/Phoenix BIOSes. What this all seems to suggest is that the 8×19 text fonts were indeed introduced by Intel, who maintained their own forks of the AMI/Phoenix firmware, and later (at least in the case of AMI) these fonts found their way back to the original vendor:
https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/AMI_Hi-Flex_BIOS#Intel_code_fork_(1993_-_1997)
https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/PhoenixBIOS_4.0_Release_6.x
https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/AMIBIOS_07.00.xx
FWIW, there was another AMIBIOS variant which ran at 640×480 for the POST/setup screen, but simply used the standard 8×16 character data with 3 additional scanlines tacked on at the bottom:
https://wiki.softhistory.org/wiki/AMIBIOS_07.00.10
That late-1996 font (TC430HX, PR440FX) looks like it was probably derived from Windows’ “Fixedsys”… an odd thing to do, since the original Fixedsys was in no way a better match for that character size than the standard VGA text fonts.
Quick research suggests that AST Premium Exec was an early 1990s line of portables. And sure enough, it had a 640×480 panel… which, as discussed, is where an 8×19 font makes good sense.
The Intel font in the 1990s BIOSes is kind of incomplete. Though I wonder if the EFI version might be significantly more complete.
FWIW, I don’t think that using 8×19 fonts was a huge compatibility issue. Most text mode software either didn’t care, or if it did (and was well-behaved) it would query the VGA before making any assumptions.
On that AST Premium Exec (and many other laptops based on similar VGA chips), the setup utility had a “Text Mode Stretch” option which would switch between 400/480-line mode for text, and set the font size accordingly. IIRC, you could toggle this with a hotkey, so any problematic software could be made to play nice.
That was a rather common thing to see, but the “unique” thing about the Premium Exec was its customized version of MS-DOS 5, whose .CPI files included additional 8×19 sizes for their code pages.
I have a “Chaplet Systems” laptop from ~1991 that has a 640×480 display and definitely uses a 8×19 font for text mode; it came with utilities to allow for compatibility with software that uses custom VGA fonts (or other 720 pixel modes; it supports Hercules emulation too); you have the option to display either the leftmost or rightmost 640 pixels, skip every 9th pixel or merge the 8th and 9th pixel columns (a simple OR operation).
It has a Cirrus Logic “Eagle” (CL-GD6x0) VGA chipset and an AMI BIOS dated 1990. The font it uses doesn’t match any of the examples shown here though, so would be of little relevance…
In getting it out to check I discovered that the “rubber” feet on the bottom have turned into a nasty sticky gunk that is remarkably difficult to get off my desk surface, but at least it still works…
@Stu: the font on that laptop probably comes from the Cirrus Logic video BIOS rather than the AMI (system) BIOS, so it should be the one linked under ‘Open Questions’. Unless the vendor customized the character design, in which case it would be interesting to see a dump of it.
(‘Stingray’ is the only name I’ve seen used for the CL-6×0 chipset; the earlier CL-5×0 was ‘Eagle II’, but I don’t know what the original ‘Eagle’ was).
It’s interesting that they went to such lengths to support Hercules emulation on a 640-pixel panel… especially since none of those solutions sound very effective. 🙂
Interesting!
Did these boards support graphics cards older than VGA?
I.E. could you use EGA, CGA or MDA/Hercules?
If so would the translated texts show up with incorrect letters?
A bit surprising that they just compressed the font, rather than put for example ü at it’s regular code.
Also, would text from add-on card BIOSes show up using this font, or the regular 8×16 font? I.E. the code that runs early on (like VGA bios initialization).
If the graphics card shows anything on the screen during its own ROM initialization, it is fully in control and decides what to show (at one point ATI had this cute but insanely time-wasting graphical spinning logo). For POSTing add-on cards (other than graphics), the Intel BIOS switches to a regular text mode. Later Intel BIOSes have the option to not show add-on card POST text.
I honestly don’t know if those boards worked with pre-VGA display adapters. I rather suspect not, or that it wasn’t tested. The Intel manuals don’t clearly state that non-VGA adapters are or aren’t supported. In practice, obviously no one was going to buy a board with an AGP slot and then kill performance by putting in an ISA video card.
Chances are that Eagle was the CL-GD410/420 VGA chip set, but that’s just a guess.
Cross referencing CL BIOS source code and GD5446 TRM, we get the following:
CL-GD510/520 = Eagle IICL-GD610/620 = Stingray
CL-GD5320 = Eagle III
CL-GD6410 = Raven
CL-GD5410 = Merlin
The source code says “Merlion” but I’m guessing it’s supposed to be Merlin, to go with Eagle and Raven.
Perhaps not at the time AGP was a thing, but I’ve used EGA with a 430 VX based motherboard back in the days. It was made by SOYO rather than Intel though, but still.
(At the time I only had a half-broken VGA monitor, but had a good working EGA monitor, so tended to mostly use EGA. Btw the PSU was broken on that VGA monitor, I got it working by feeding 105V DC and 24V DC from two external PSUs 🙂 )
More seriously though, a use case that Intel probably didn’t think about would had been aids for visually impaired, like hardware that would read out what is written to the screen, that might just check what is written to the regular CGA/EGA/VGA text screen address. It would most likely work when using English as the setup language, but would create weird results when using any of the other languages when they used language specific characters.
Since we’re on the topic of UEFI, any idea about this mystery?
https://stackoverflow.com/q/79599582
>> In practice, obviously no one was going to buy a board with an AGP slot and then kill performance by putting in an ISA video card.
Well… I remember a client (a big theater) asking for a 19″ rack computer with 8 independent display outputs. I think we settled on Asus P2B, Matrox G400 (the only dual display card at the time), and then various single-display PCI & ISA cards mixed together, topped off with an external 3-slot ISA extender board because the client also needed to install additional cards as well.
With Windows 98. I installed one card and driver at a time …and it worked perfectly.
The speed difference of ISA cards was quite noticeable when moving windows in those screens. I don’t know the use case, but we didn’t get any negative feedback on that.
Perhaps there were professional graphics cards with multiple outputs back then (1999-2000) – I really don’t know – but probably resulting in an additional zero in the price tag of the PC.
Testing of simultaneous output of the displays was the trickiest part, in a crammed computer shop back room and 8x CRT monitors and associated cables scattered around!
Back to the topic – I don’t remember testing with just an ISA video card, so cannot say whether the POST screen would have been visible. IIRC, BIOS settings of the era had initial display option of just AGP or PCI.
I think the most recent motherboard I used with provision for a non-VGA display at boot was a Super micro P6SBA (440BX chipset). The BIOS was AMI WinBIOS, which would seamlessly draw its pseudo-GUI with standard CP437 drawing characters if the video card didn’t support character redefinition.
If this needed custom hardware (and software certainly would not work during BIOS POST) then I simply don’t think it was a use case Intel was concerned about.
Matrox and others made PCI cards with multiple chips, I believe two or four. The G400 was the first card that supported two outputs with a single chip, and thus didn’t cost a lot extra.
I don’t think the multi-chip cards were insanely expensive but I don’t really know. It was definitely a specialty item.
XGA was the first (or at least early) graphics card that supported 7 or 8 adapters in a system, and there were special drivers for it.
Unrelated, but one famous errata was “BIOS does not support no-emulation mode for CD-ROM boot”
A strange fact I learned from my company’s legal counsel is that bitmap fonts are usually not copyrightable (in the US). So it would make sense for BIOS vendors to be “promiscuous” in copying them from others.
Yes. Many VGA BIOSes used IBM’s font bitmaps for that reason.
I’m not sure if that is/was true in other parts of the world though.
The legal problem would probably be to prove “who was first”. I don’t know if what happens in USA counts elsewhere, or if who was first in that specific country would be what counts there? I.E. whoever brought in a ROM chip or disk with the VGA font first into country X might be considered the one holding the copyright, and with no way to really prove this (I bet few thought about creating proof of having something at a specific point in time for this type of stuff) it wouldn’t hold, perhaps?
(At least in Sweden the classic way of proving that you had something at a specific point in time was to mail it to yourself with the type of mail where the post service guarantees that the mail hasn’t been opened, and when you collect your mail you don’t open it. This has been used to prove who has copyright for music and such).
> Laptops are where I’d most expect to see 8×19 fonts. Especially on circa pre-1995 laptops that had a 640×480 screen which simply could not display normal VGA text mode (720×400) all that well. The 8×19 font was a far better fit.
Just on a whim entered 6100v in the archive.org’s search: https://archive.org/download/laptop-6100-v
The 8×19 font in vga bios at offset 0xc000.
Slight update:
Having taken the machine apart (to remove the BIOS battery which was starting to leak), the display board (a separate daughterboard) clearly has the CL-GD610 and CL-GD620 chipset.
The Cirrus Logic configuration tool calls itself “EAGLE VGA Controller Utility”, so that’s where I got the “Eagle” name from. Of course, that probably just means the utility was originally written for the older “Eagle” chipset.
Would you be able to upload your AN430TX and AL440LX dumps somewhere? Because I’ve been looking for proper dumps with boot block for ages.
Also, Intel had been using 8×19 fonts earlier than that, already with their AMI BIOS’es – TC430HX, CU430HX, etc.
I just noticed that you did mention those. Now, non-Intel Phoenix BIOS’es with 8×19 font also existed, the trend started around the late Pentium to early Pentium II era when the trend of graphics splash screens begans.
Also, MS-DOS 6.00 had *.IC_ files (supposedly expanding to *.ICE, perhaps standing for Icelandic?) which were .CPI files with the addition of 8×19 fonts.
I also have at least one old Yugoslavian YUSCII font driver with 8×19 characters, no idea for which graphics card.
Also, Japanese and Traditional Chinese versions of DOS, ie. DOS/V, used an 8×19 font in their native mode, as did JEGA and JVGA cards when switched to Japanese mode. I’m not exactly sure why the chose 8×19 instead of the usual 8×16.
As a side note, the IBM PS/55 Display Adapter used a 12×24 font (and 24×24 for DBCS characters) and its text mode resolution was 1024×768.
Inside EGA.ICE there’s a string “EXEC-NW.CPI” and “Copyright AST Europe”. So it looks like that font came from AST and was meant to support their Premium Exec laptops, which did use 8×19 fonts.
I could not find anything. My best guess is that it was something related to EFI itself, presumably something that is now obsolete.
> As a side note, the IBM PS/55 Display Adapter used a 12×24 font (and 24×24 for DBCS characters) and its text mode resolution was 1024×768.
An interesting implementation detail: these j* cards store part of the font pattern for fonts with dot width > 8 in the video memory plane 3. I was bitten by that when writing graphic textmode switch code for tsr.
I saw someone else also request a ROM dump upload; I’d be too interested in one, if that’s not much work to upload somewhere =)
I’d love to take a look at the internals of this, but yeah, if it’s not too much to ask…
Well, the an4x0 dumps would be good to have since nobody has archived/dumped them in the past, if possible. Hope you don’t lose them.
Let me explain the reason as well – the AN430TX (and the AL440TX, and other such Intel Phoenix BIOS’es), seem to be sensitive to the bootblock – the bootblock is not included in the official BIOS distributions, but the BIOS checks for it, we have two bootblocks dumped already but only earler BIOS revisions work with them, P07 onwards don’t (except for Packard Bell’s P07, somehow). That’s why we would appreciate it very much if you could upload your dumps somewhere as they appear to work with the latest BIOS revisions.
Thanks in advance!
Sorry, vacation travel. Yes, the boot block is missing from the BIOS updates, which makes reconstructing the BIOS image from the updates quite a bit harder. I imagine Intel did that to reduce the chance that a BIOS update gone wrong would completely brick the system.
The dumps are here.
Thank you very much!
And apparently, even with your bootblock, the stock AN430TX BIOS revision P10 still goes to undocumented POST code 6Bh (after dococumented POST code 69h) before outputting anything at all to the screen… at this point, I wonder what on Earth it’s doing.
Interesting post. I like that special 8×19 font in the Phoenix BIOSes myself and years ago, I started downloaded a bunch of Phoenix BIOSes from Intel with aspirations of gathering as many “original” characters from that font as I could (I found that the subset of non-ASCII characters varied a little in some BIOSes), and filling out the characters I couldn’t find using the AST Premium Exec font in VileR’s pack to produce a usable CP437 version of the font. Never got around to finishing it, and IIRC Intel later purged those old BIOSes from their site along with other old downloads. I did download “phoedeco” at the time, but I may have also/instead used Phoenix BIOS Editor v2.1.0.0, also downloaded from Intel as I recall (filename “BiosEdit2100.zip”), to extract the font data.