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Ever wondered why VGA text mode had some times ugly looking graphics drawing modes? Most all fonts had a glyph size of 9×16 pixels, however, the 9th row of pixels was just a duplicate of the 8th row. This added some clarity to text, but made graphical text mode applications look sometime ugly. Here's an example of what a wall of 50% gradient characters looks like in VGA:
To correct for this, you can run a text mode setup utility called TM (will be available soon in the files section), which allows for programming your VGA adapter to display a wide variety of text modes. To set up your computer to run in 8×14 pixel mode, run TM as follows:
tm -f 14,2
To return back to VGA text mode, run TM as follows:
tm -f 16,3
For a list of all supported parameters, run
tm -?
With 8×14 text mode, we can see the improvement:
You can also run it at boot time, and what's best, it's not a TSR, doesn't stay in memory so you'll still be able to enjoy nice quality text with no compromises.