Text-mode apps (Was :Who are the "spacists"?)

[Tim Chase]

On 2017-03-27 02:37, Chris Angelico wrote:
> > In DOS, (I don't remember if in all versions or only some)
> > one could do all this and this opens very rich possibilities for
> > approximating of objects with tiles. The only limitations
> > that one uses 255 tiles, but even this enables to build
> > whole 'worlds' and state of the art apps. So I would call this
> > pseudographics and not few sticks and corner tiles
> > (which I cannot even define and upload easily).  
> 
> Yeah; if my memory serves me, this was an IBM BIOS feature, so all
> versions of DOS would be equally able to do it. But it's basically a
> form of tile graphics, not text. 

It was a function of the EGA/VGA card (maybe CGA? Though I think
that might have been limited to the upper 128 chars while the lower
128 were fixed), not the IBM BIOS.  But yes, there were font-editors
for the EGA/VGA fonts and, once set, they'd appear even in things
like WordPerfect, QuattroPro, Lotus, or Turbo Pascal.  All the rage
back in my 286-wolfenstein3d-playing-turbopascal-programming days. ;-)

-tkc