That was one option I thought of at first (mentioned in the first section), but the info I found indicated that the /370 models used the same firmware as the "plain" 5170s - if there were any BIOS extensions, they were probably somewhere on the add-on cards. The AT/370 also had 512K of on board RAM, while this BIOS seems to indicate 640K.
Back when the demo was released, there were no emulators capable of running it all the way through. People are free to believe what they want, but as we presented it at a demoparty (Evoke 2022), I can tell you that the organizers wouldn't have allowed it in the compo lineup if they didn't see it running on the hardware in person. :)
I am in awe of GloriousCow's crazy achievement in debugging it on MartyPC and making it work to perfect accuracy... that's true next-level skill, and the rest of the group would undoubtedly echo my sentiment!
It's not every day that an emulator author has to resort to analyzing bus-sniffer traces to debug and fix a demo effect - and certainly writeups that go into this level of detail are few and far between!
Yeah, I should think that's exactly what happened. I was a big AA user too, but at that point in time I wasn't aware of the Atari ST connection (and hadn't ever seen an ST), so whenever I spotted that font in a game I just thought of it as "the Autodesk Animator font", and assumed that's what they used for the artwork. (Sometimes you could even spot tell-tale effects like that "countour gradient" thing, which would confirm it!)
It definitely is. Pretty amazing what you can still find out about this stuff after all these years, now that we can cross-reference and search data so easily (and that collectors, preservationists, and emulator authors are still coming up with previously unknown findings).
Thanks for those comments, much appreciated. I'm still planning future updates to that font collection, and I'll probably include straight-up binary dumps of the characters, so you won't have to jump through hoops to convert them (although many of them are already available in this form at https://github.com/viler-int10h/vga-text-mode-fonts - all you need is a hex dump).
Do the Modern DOS fonts have a particular advantage for you, in terms of implementation? If they do, let me know and I'll consider those improvements as well!
Hello VileR! Thank you for replying to my comment! The Modern DOS font does not have any particular advantage from a technical perspective. It seems to be a fusion of a couple of OEM fonts.
According to my examination of the Modern DOS font, it seems to be based on the IBM VGA 8x16 and Verite 8x16 OEM fonts[1][2]. Some glyphs in it look exactly like those of IBM VGA 8x16 while some others look exactly like those of Verite 8x16. But it also has some glyphs that match neither of the two OEM fonts. Instead they appear to be adaptations of the glyphs found in one or both of the OEM fonts.
To summarise, Modern DOS does not appear to be a faithful reproduction of any OEM font. Despite considerable deviations from the OEM fonts, I quite liked it due to some choices made in the font. For example, it has the slashed zero of Verite and it also has the raised stem for the digit 2 and the curved stem for the digit 7 from IBM VGA 8x16. I personally happened to like this type of amalgamation. However it is not suitable for anyone who cares about accuracy and fidelity to specific OEM fonts.
For anyone interested in obtaining reproductions of the OEM fonts that are as faithful as possible[3], in my opinion, they should go to your page at https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/ without a doubt! Thanks for creating and maintaining this wonderful resource!
Oh, gotcha - FWIW the fonts I labeled 'Verite' do come from Rendition Verite video BIOS charsets, but those in turn seem to be descended from the 'Phoenix VGA BIOS' type of font, or rather they're in the same loose family of fonts which shared that visual style... can't check at the moment, but it wouldn't surprise me if Rendition used some Phoenix VBIOS derivative too.
I also believe the font used in the VMware VBIOS is derived from that, so those who run a lot of text-mode stuff in VMware may take a liking to it.
It draws you a 'Golden IBM PC' - and then the screen goes "well green, anyway"! At least if you're running it on a monochrome board (where it evidently expects that you're using the green-screen 5151 monitor) - haven't seen the ending in CGA. :)
