OutTextXY and ASCII characters 2

[OcelotTabby]

Our software got hit by the problem of some modern graphics cards not supporting the full ASCII character set. The text is written with OutTextXY(). The characters 'A' - 'z' look fine, but the numbers are scrambled. Specifically, the ASCII characers 1-64 and 123-127 are bad, where the rest are good.

My questions are two fold:

1) Is there any hope that the newer BIOSes will support the full ASCII set in the future, and what are the chances that they can do this quickly?

2) There was an earlier thread (thread935-764014) that addressed this problem, and suggested writing one's own OutTextXY procedure. Can somebody please provide more details on this? Thank you!

 

[dilettante]

I think you can expect it to get worse!

There are strange directions being explored, such as Mac-style "BIOSs" for Intel Macs, something called a Disk Boot ROM that is a very minimal POST & boot BIOS, and "BIOS free" systems on the drawing boards and in the manufacturing pipeline.

Before long the only new systems with the BIOS code you're using will probably be cards intended as embedded system mainboards.

 

[lionelhill]

A few thoughts:

(1) Clumsy (but easy) solution: write a quick thing that outputs all the letters to the screen, and getpics them into a file, one by one. Run it (once only) on a PC that definitely outputs the characters correctly, and make the output file part of your application. Then write your own OuttextXY that putpics the characters you've saved, and use this instead of the original outtextXY in your application.

(2) Better solution (hard work): write your own outtextXY working directly with VGA. Much more work but quicker text. And you can add things like rotated text if you feel enthusiastic.

(3) For the future: it might get worse, but it might also get better: for well over a decade now, people have been saying that the next version of windows will not support DOS (definitely, no way, absolutely!). But WinXP supports DOS better than ever before. There was a brief spell when typical PCs didn't have a dos mouse driver in their windows dos-boxes, but I haven't met one of them for a long time now.