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 utility called, you guessed it, Text Mode by Jason Hood. It is a great freeware utility, 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:

What's best about this utility, is that it's not a TSR, doesn't stay in memory so you can set it up to run in your autoexec.bat file every time the computer boots, and still be able to enjoy nice quality text with no compromises.

Text Mode by Jason Hood <jadoxa@yahoo.com.au>.
Version 1.02 (15 February, 2000). Freeware.
http://tm.adoxa.cjb.net/

Usage: TM.EXE <cols>[x<rows>] -m[<mode>] ,<lines>
                       -c[<cols>] -r[<rows>] -f[<height|file>]
                       -p[<page>] -s[<attr>] -b[<border>] -d
                       -w[<height>]

cols  can be one of 40, 80 or 90
rows  ranges from 12 to 80
-m    uses BIOS to set a mode (in hexadecimal)
lines sets the scan lines to use: 1 to 4 = 200, 350, 400 or 480
-f    sets the font height (6 to 16) or loads a font from file
-p    will select a page (1 to, at most, 8)
-s    will save screen contents or clear screen to attr
-b    will set the border/frame/overscan color
-d    displays current columns, rows and font height
-w    will write all fonts or a particular height to file

Missing values will display the current value, unless -q is added.
Errorlevel is set to the last used (not the last displayed).