#VGA

After learning about Mode 13h last time, I’ve been digging about in the ancient tomes of wisdom and discovered Mode-X. Let’s make a PC’s VGA card do odd things it was never designed for.

After learning about Mode 13h last time, I’ve been digging about in the ancient tomes of wisdom and discovered Mode-X. Let’s make a PC’s VGA card do odd things it was never designed for.

Let’s move into the 1990s and draw some graphics! I’ve got a whole 320x200 pixel screen, 256 colours and direct access to the video card. No APIs, no helper functions. Just me and the video RAM.

Thanks to @hobbified on YouTube, making the EPA logo look correct was quite straight forward…

Because why not, it looks simpler than it really is and we’ll get to fall down a rabbit hole trying to draw the Energy Star logo.

Come back to a time when 640k was enough, and when a 486 DX2/66 was considered a fast computer. None of this modern multi-core rubbish or branch predicting exploitable nonsense here. Just you, me, DOS and a C compiler.

The RC2014 is a DIY Z80 based computer that talks to the outside world using serial comms. This means you need a serial interface to another computer in order to control it.

I use a Raspberry Pi Pico and turn it into a serial terminal for my RC2014.