7 ms·

I just want an 80×25 console, but that's no longer possible

74 points by teddyh 1y ago

Update: Running an Accurate 80×25 DOS-Style Console on Modern Linux Is Possible After All https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10907-running-an-accurate-80x25-dos-style-console-on-modern-linux-is-possible-after-all https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10907-running-an-acc...

throwaway1777 1y ago
Getting an old machine is the way. I can’t think of why I would want this and I’m old so I don’t think it’s coming back.
kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
You can still have a console on a serial port with a dumb terminal. Plenty of SFF PCs have them via RJ45 ports.
- ranger_danger 1y ago
  > Plenty of SFF PCs have them via RJ45 ports. Could you please name a single model of SFF PC that exposes a serial connection via RJ45 port?
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    Look at the CWWK/Topton boxes.
    - helf 1y ago
      [dead]
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  I haven't heard of any apart from industrial PCs.
dapperdrake 1y ago
Booted a Dell mini PC with debian, but without X11 and attached a video projector. The old StackOverflow answers to fix overscan problems failed to do anything. Editing sshd configuration files with the first six text columns off screen is quite a unique experience.
- kwk1 1y ago
  Last time I dealt with this I launched tmux and started working on the right side of the screen with a vertical split.
superice 1y ago
Yes, and I want FireWire. Oh, and I'd really prefer 16 bit real mode CPUs. While we're at it, why not go for support for serial connection mice? This reads like such an arbitrary wish without a reasoning WHY you would want this. I'm sure OP has a reason for preferring it, but what makes the 80x25 superior in their opinion?
- bombcar 1y ago
  One reason it could be nice is what I experienced a decade or so ago, the damn machine kept changing video modes during boot and the LCD couldn't keep up so an important screen was missed when diagnosing a boot issue. Had to get a CRT to see what the hell was going on.
  - IcePic 1y ago
    This even applies to remove-viewing software that wants to "follow" the resolution changes, flipping your remote window size around a lot. Super annoying.
- autoexec 1y ago
  The author listed several reasons why they want it. Also, it should still be possible to connect a serial mouse to a modern system thanks to adapters. I still have serial to PS/2 and PS/2 to USB adapters floating around in a tackle box.
  - Galanwe 1y ago
    > The author listed several reasons why they want it. To be fair, they listed reasons to need a 80x25 terminal, but not reasons to need a 80x25 console. I'm a bit unclear as to why they could not use a regular 80x25 term in their graphical session.
    - db48x 1y ago
      They specifically want 8×16 characters in 9×16 character cells on a 720×400 display that has an overall 4:3 aspect ratio. There’s no way to achieve that on anything other than a real hardware CRT. No amount of fiddling with fonts in either X11 or Wayland or any other display manager will change the size of the pixels on your LCD.
autoexec 1y ago
While some people might not see the need for it, the author lists several reasons why it'd be nice to have. The article mentions that there are multiple old (and no longer working) workarounds and tricks that used to allow for 80x25 and presumably those existed and were shared online because others also wanted it. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible? It seems like a reasonable thing to want to be able to change and even force resolutions to whatever your hardware will support, especially if there's a large amount of old software out there which expects a certain resolution. Old computers are very nice to have, but increasingly difficult to find and find working parts for. They also tend to come with some pretty big trade offs in terms of size, noise, and energy inefficiency. It'd mean a lot of less than ideal hardware just to get back something that people already had.
- db48x 1y ago
  He wants to use a display mode with rectangular pixels. No matter what he does in software, that’s going to require specialized hardware. It’ll take a real CRT. No LCD ever made can change the shape of its own pixels.
  - mnw21cam 1y ago
    Most LCD displays will do hardware scaling when given a resolution lower than the native resolution.
  - JdeBP 1y ago
    More importantly, VGA text modes cannot be exactly simulated with standard VGA/VESA graphics modes. The people who wrote fake Blue Screen of Death joke programs for Windows NT discovered this years ago. The article author is explicitly looking for 720 by 400, not 640 by 400, and is trying to obtain that using Linux mechanisms that select graphics modes and do not configure the hardware to be in an actual text mode. i.e. fbcon rather than vgacon.
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    Untrue. Even cheap-ass imported HDMI monitors support aspect-corrected scaling from 720x400 (80x25 x 9x16) to their native resolutions, even if not all of them support fill to screen.
dreamlayers 1y ago
If you want a custom resolution in Linux drm.edid_firmware= works well with the right EDID. For me, the worst things about the Linux graphical console are lack of scrollback and horrible performance. Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode, and of course it is super fast because each character is only 2 bytes. In graphics mode you can only fix this by running a program that provides its own graphical terminal, like kmscon or fbterm. The best thing about the graphical console is ability to use bigger fonts, so your characters can be smooth and not pixelated. I like the Terminus fonts. As long as performance isn't a problem it's better to increase font size than to decrease the resolution.
- hamandcheese 1y ago
  > Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode Dumb question: when I boot a modern systemd-based distro installer in terminal mode, am I using "VGA text mode" or "graphics mode"? Do I have to be literally using VGA to use VGA text mode? EDIT: I read TFA and it seems like the answer is that I probably have never used VGA text mode.
  - toast0 1y ago
    Depends. A UEFI boot is going to put you in graphics mode; I don't think you can get into VGA text mode from an UEFI boot, without some serious dark arts. UEFI has a text mode console API, but it's part of bootservices and those are exited somewhere on the way to starting the Linux kernel. If you're doing a BIOS boot, you might be using VGA text mode, if you haven't loaded a framebuffer driver. VGA text mode works over BNC, DVI, HDMI, DP, etc, if that was your question, you don't need a VGA connector. EGA text mode might be similar enough to also work, but that's outside my depth. I'm not sure that Linux uses it, but VGA has nice things to accelerate scrolling. You can set the top of the screen down into the buffer, and then set a line number where it resets to the top of the buffer. If you set the line stride so that it evenly divides the buffer (typically wider than the line width), it makes scrolling and wrapping around the buffer very simple and elegant. UEFI GOP doesn't provide any mechanism for a buffer larger than what's displayed, so scrolling requires copying. :(
- yetihehe 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jcalvinowens 1y ago
The 24x32 Terminus font is my favorite. It's exactly 80 columns wide at 1080p, just over 33 rows. I run it on 4K screens though.
- genpfault 1y ago
  > 24x32 Terminus font Where are you seeing that size? The widest variant the Terminus project page[1] lists is 16x32. [1]: https://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ https://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
  - jcalvinowens 1y ago
    Oh you're right, doh, it is the 16x32 one I was thinking of. So 720p not 1080p for 80col, and you don't quite get 25 rows.
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
Is it just me or is this a misunderstanding of computer architecture? The computer can only output what the screen can support (native resolution), the screen can only display what the video card gives it, the video card can only display what the video card driver tells it to do. They all have to work in tandem. If the system you're using (ARM??) doesn't have a particular fbdev driver, it still works thanks to the simpledrm weirdness. But if you want very particular results, you're gonna need to ship a driver for your card, to tell the card what to do, to tell the monitor what to do. The complaint seems to be that architectures change? I dunno what to tell you man. I hate technology too, but it do be changin'.
thakoppno 1y ago
80 x 24 is the original teletype size. Personal preference are tautological.
mieses 1y ago
The SGI Irix boot console was 80 characters wide and kind of elegant. It worked on different resolutions and looked like a floating window where the margins could be of arbitrary size.
whyandgrowth 1y ago
Sorry, but I don't understand why you even need an 80x25 console instead of a standard one. Maybe I don't understand something, so please explain?
- avhon1 1y ago
  80x25 is by far the most common standard for console size
  - whyandgrowth 1y ago
    Thanks
  - burnt-resistor 1y ago
    No. It's the standard CGA/MCGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA int 10h mode 3, where on VGA/SVGA cards it was a 80x25 console comprised of 9x16 glyphs (8x16 really, where the right-most bit is duplicated) for an analog effective resolution of 720x400 in 4:3 aspect ratio. Historically, when processors, motherboard buses, and video cards of physical machines were much slower, text modes were accelerated ways to write text such that they were much faster than writing and scrolling text graphically in a video framebuffer. Interestingly, on VGA/SVGA cards, it's possible to do double buffering of text by page flipping but it's pretty pointless even on real hardware. Emulated hardware generally doesn't suffer from tearing effects that happen on real hardware where large updates (mostly in graphics modes rather than text modes) aren't synchronized with the raster scan and end up looking bad by showing partial portions of the previous frame and current frame while an update is happening. In graphic modes, this was mostly eliminated by double- and triple-buffering with precisely-timed page flipping on video cards that had enough memory to have 2 or more whole frames.. (B800:0000 and A000:0000 are permanently etched in my brain.)
  - cesarb 1y ago
    AFAIK, no, the most common standard for console size is 80x24, which came from the VT100 and is used by default on terminal emulators like xterm or the GNOME terminal.
bdamm 1y ago
Honestly, good riddance. And let's chuck into the dustbin of history fiddling with IRQ dipswitches to disambiguate your mouse, video, disk, and audio controllers; the "turbo" button; "It is now safe to turn off your computer"; CGA/EGA/VGA/HGA/MCGA/SVGA/XGA, RLL/MFM/SCSI/IDE, and while we're at it, TSR programs like sound drivers, mouse drivers, etc. Let's not even discuss OS/2. You know what sucked? Booting up into CGA and not being able to figure out how to escape that abomination. Why not pine for that? All of this trash is behind us and frankly I think we're better off for it. If you want to go play with obsolete computers, then finding some old computers and some old computer junkies who still enjoy that junk is the right way to go. Personally, I had my fun, but I like our modern machines so much more than those old smokey capacitor poppers. But I have to admit, I almost miss compiling my own kernel. Almost.
- jbm 1y ago
  Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it. I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance. Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    SimCity CD-ROM edition was the greatest. It needed sound card drivers, mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers and MSCDEX, and it required 605kB of free conventional memory. Oh, and only some hard drives were standard like that. For others, you needed to set sectors, tracks and landing zone manually. Happy fun times if your CMOS battery ran out.
  - rob74 1y ago
    Ah, yes, and I also remember what a relief it was when the newer generation of games (starting with Doom IIRC) used "DOS extenders" to switch the CPU into protected mode and be able to use 16 MB or more without any fiddling... Another anecdote from around that time (or a bit later): some friends were alarmed that their PC was not booting Windows as usual. Turns out they had forgotten a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, which was showing some cryptic text mode menu on startup. Easy fix: remove CD, restart, works...
joshu 1y ago
i got an sbc running recently and the font was so small on my monitor i had difficulty reading it. i wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100+ rows and many, many columns.
gorgoiler 1y ago
Related to this, the other day I learned that QEMU will render VGA mode text to your terminal using curses: $ qemu -curses … What a lovely feature, if you can get it to boot something with a VGA mode.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  It is very cute. It doesn't take much to use a serial console though, or even enabling SPICE for a fully featured (and detachable).
- professoretc 1y ago
  This also lets you run QEMU over SSH, if you want. I use this in my assembly language course; towards the end I give an assignment to write Hello, World! as a 16-bit real mode MBR bootloader. Students can do the whole thing on our SSH server, including testing in QEMU (and even attaching GDB to it to debug) not needing to install anything locally.
userbinator 1y ago
What's notable about the text modes is that they are fully done in hardware, so scrolling and writing lots of text is extremely fast and consumes very little CPU. Unfortunately on the hardware side, the allegedly-VGA-compatible part of newer GPUs is increasingly not as compatible as it should be. The "extended text modes" of earlier VGA cards supporting 132 columns or more have become nearly nonexistent, although even the original IBM VGA hardware API should be able to handle a 100 x 75 text mode, if not more, albeit with a reduced refresh rate. I remember almost 2 decades ago trying to get an Intel 900-series integrated GPU to display more than 80 columns in text mode, to challenge the datasheet claim that it was "not supported" (the original IBM VGA had an unofficial 90x60 mode at 720x480), and was unsuccessful; the hardware seemed to be deliberately restricting the settings, and triggered a hard lockup whenever I tried.
untrimmed 1y ago
This isn't just about an 80x25 console, is it? It feels like another layer of abstraction piled between me and the actual hardware.
Animats 1y ago
There's something to be said for not having a dumb VGA controller. Some years ago, I had a headless system running QNX in a control application. About 30% of the CPU time was being consumed by something. It turned out that the system had a very minimal VGA controller, not connected to anything. The QNX boot image was capable of running with no console at all, which was the intent. But it found the VGA controller and launched a screen saver. The screen saver worked by shifting the entire screen one pixel at a time, which, with this minimal VGA controller, was a very slow read from VRAM, one byte at a time. This was so slow that it ate up a huge amount of CPU time. This being QNX, it wasn't at high priority, so the real time stuff preempted it.
db48x 1y ago
It probably is impossible unless you actually have a VGA device and a CRT. There’s no way your LCD is going to distort its pixels so that they’re rectangular.
Yizahi 1y ago
I don't get the intention of the author. No, I mean, I get that he wants a 80x25 terminal "eventually" but I don't get how exactly. He says it himself that he has multiple different displays, so even if he did manage to get his text only terminal, it will be microscopic on one of the displays, giant on another etc. For me personally, the whole point of terminal rendered by graphic pipeline is that I can get terminal the same size, same font size, and same everything regardless if I use 1080p scaled to 150%, or native 4K or some ancient LCD display on some old laptop (remember 1024x600?). Ok, maybe it is not religiously pure way and maybe it is not as robust and stable way as pure text, but we do get usable terminal in return at least.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- juancn 1y ago
  I read it as a nostalgia piece. When terminals were common, they pretty much all were 80 or 40 columns and 25 rows, not a lot of choice, most were about the same size. I actually like modern emulated terminals, with all the bells and whistles.
  - OCTAGRAM 1y ago
    I yet to see any modern terminal with bells and whistles like in Acronis OS Selector 5
- m463 1y ago
  He wants a readable text console at boot. Also 80x25 has a lot of history, and some things work better at that size. I don't know if you've ever tried using a non-graphical display on linux recently, but if you have say a 4k display, you get unreadably tiny text. It also breaks a lot of text-mode stuff. If you've ever tried to FIX this on your system, you'll find a bunch of roadblocks. You can't just use an easily available font for the console. Console fonts have to be created or converted into a non-standard .pfs or .pfsu format. most linux distributions have at most a 16x32 font available if you take the time to do the override properly. Even that font is pretty small on 4k. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console
arghwhat 1y ago
If the kmscon project wasn't dead, they'd be able to get whatever number of cells and rows they'd like as it doesn't use now-obscure built-in display device modes by setting the font settings. On the other hand, kmscon is just a graphical terminal emulator and display server built into one. Running `cage foot` (i.e., the very minimal "foot" terminal emulator running under the single-app "cage" display server) and setting foot's settings to whatever you'd like would get you a better (and importantly, fully maintained) experience.
1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago
"Well, the old vga= option that you are used to doesn't work when you booted from UEFI or on non-x86 platforms." This is one reason I appreciate older computers; I prefer VGA textmode But, for today's computers, kmscon and libtsm, and frecon from a trillion-dollar advertising services company, are interesting.^1 For example, being able to zoom in and out using keyboard shortcuts is useful When I used computers with only VGA textmode running NetBSD, I always wished for a console that could possibly display images, like a Linux framebuffer, perhaps; vesafb on NetBSD was still a WIP. I was tired of switching back and forth from textmode to X11. Eventually I gave up on X11 and began using separate computers on same local network but with not gateway to the internet in order to view graphics As a Linux user today, it's funny to read the complaints about framebuffers I am not "either/or" when it comes to BSD v Linux. I use both. Each has its merits. But I think NetBSD may be the nicest OS for people who prefer the console. At least it is for me Making it easy for mortals to run the OS on older computers^2 is important 1. https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/raw/master/src/kmscon_conf.c https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/raw/master/src/kmscon_conf.... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon/+/HEAD/DESIGN-DOC.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon/+/006bdb2c68d9f0eb0a68cace02b953c11e5f630d/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon... 2. For example, computers that are unsuitable for delivering today's internet ads
teddyh 1y ago
Followup post: Running an Accurate 80×25 DOS-Style Console on Modern Linux Is Possible After All <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289481>

74 points by teddyh 1y ago

throwaway1777 1y ago

Getting an old machine is the way. I can’t think of why I would want this and I’m old so I don’t think it’s coming back.

kevin_thibedeau 1y ago

You can still have a console on a serial port with a dumb terminal. Plenty of SFF PCs have them via RJ45 ports.

ranger_danger 1y ago
> Plenty of SFF PCs have them via RJ45 ports. Could you please name a single model of SFF PC that exposes a serial connection via RJ45 port?
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  Look at the CWWK/Topton boxes.
  - helf 1y ago
    [dead]
burnt-resistor 1y ago
I haven't heard of any apart from industrial PCs.

dapperdrake 1y ago

Booted a Dell mini PC with debian, but without X11 and attached a video projector. The old StackOverflow answers to fix overscan problems failed to do anything. Editing sshd configuration files with the first six text columns off screen is quite a unique experience.

kwk1 1y ago
Last time I dealt with this I launched tmux and started working on the right side of the screen with a vertical split.

superice 1y ago

Yes, and I want FireWire. Oh, and I'd really prefer 16 bit real mode CPUs. While we're at it, why not go for support for serial connection mice? This reads like such an arbitrary wish without a reasoning WHY you would want this. I'm sure OP has a reason for preferring it, but what makes the 80x25 superior in their opinion?

bombcar 1y ago
One reason it could be nice is what I experienced a decade or so ago, the damn machine kept changing video modes during boot and the LCD couldn't keep up so an important screen was missed when diagnosing a boot issue. Had to get a CRT to see what the hell was going on.
- IcePic 1y ago
  This even applies to remove-viewing software that wants to "follow" the resolution changes, flipping your remote window size around a lot. Super annoying.
autoexec 1y ago
The author listed several reasons why they want it. Also, it should still be possible to connect a serial mouse to a modern system thanks to adapters. I still have serial to PS/2 and PS/2 to USB adapters floating around in a tackle box.
- Galanwe 1y ago
  > The author listed several reasons why they want it. To be fair, they listed reasons to need a 80x25 terminal, but not reasons to need a 80x25 console. I'm a bit unclear as to why they could not use a regular 80x25 term in their graphical session.
  - db48x 1y ago
    They specifically want 8×16 characters in 9×16 character cells on a 720×400 display that has an overall 4:3 aspect ratio. There’s no way to achieve that on anything other than a real hardware CRT. No amount of fiddling with fonts in either X11 or Wayland or any other display manager will change the size of the pixels on your LCD.

autoexec 1y ago

While some people might not see the need for it, the author lists several reasons why it'd be nice to have. The article mentions that there are multiple old (and no longer working) workarounds and tricks that used to allow for 80x25 and presumably those existed and were shared online because others also wanted it. I don't see why it shouldn't be possible? It seems like a reasonable thing to want to be able to change and even force resolutions to whatever your hardware will support, especially if there's a large amount of old software out there which expects a certain resolution. Old computers are very nice to have, but increasingly difficult to find and find working parts for. They also tend to come with some pretty big trade offs in terms of size, noise, and energy inefficiency. It'd mean a lot of less than ideal hardware just to get back something that people already had.

db48x 1y ago
He wants to use a display mode with rectangular pixels. No matter what he does in software, that’s going to require specialized hardware. It’ll take a real CRT. No LCD ever made can change the shape of its own pixels.
- mnw21cam 1y ago
  Most LCD displays will do hardware scaling when given a resolution lower than the native resolution.
- JdeBP 1y ago
  More importantly, VGA text modes cannot be exactly simulated with standard VGA/VESA graphics modes. The people who wrote fake Blue Screen of Death joke programs for Windows NT discovered this years ago. The article author is explicitly looking for 720 by 400, not 640 by 400, and is trying to obtain that using Linux mechanisms that select graphics modes and do not configure the hardware to be in an actual text mode. i.e. fbcon rather than vgacon.
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  Untrue. Even cheap-ass imported HDMI monitors support aspect-corrected scaling from 720x400 (80x25 x 9x16) to their native resolutions, even if not all of them support fill to screen.

dreamlayers 1y ago

If you want a custom resolution in Linux drm.edid_firmware= works well with the right EDID. For me, the worst things about the Linux graphical console are lack of scrollback and horrible performance. Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode, and of course it is super fast because each character is only 2 bytes. In graphics mode you can only fix this by running a program that provides its own graphical terminal, like kmscon or fbterm. The best thing about the graphical console is ability to use bigger fonts, so your characters can be smooth and not pixelated. I like the Terminus fonts. As long as performance isn't a problem it's better to increase font size than to decrease the resolution.

hamandcheese 1y ago
> Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode Dumb question: when I boot a modern systemd-based distro installer in terminal mode, am I using "VGA text mode" or "graphics mode"? Do I have to be literally using VGA to use VGA text mode? EDIT: I read TFA and it seems like the answer is that I probably have never used VGA text mode.
- toast0 1y ago
  Depends. A UEFI boot is going to put you in graphics mode; I don't think you can get into VGA text mode from an UEFI boot, without some serious dark arts. UEFI has a text mode console API, but it's part of bootservices and those are exited somewhere on the way to starting the Linux kernel. If you're doing a BIOS boot, you might be using VGA text mode, if you haven't loaded a framebuffer driver. VGA text mode works over BNC, DVI, HDMI, DP, etc, if that was your question, you don't need a VGA connector. EGA text mode might be similar enough to also work, but that's outside my depth. I'm not sure that Linux uses it, but VGA has nice things to accelerate scrolling. You can set the top of the screen down into the buffer, and then set a line number where it resets to the top of the buffer. If you set the line stride so that it evenly divides the buffer (typically wider than the line width), it makes scrolling and wrapping around the buffer very simple and elegant. UEFI GOP doesn't provide any mechanism for a buffer larger than what's displayed, so scrolling requires copying. :(
yetihehe 1y ago

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jcalvinowens 1y ago

The 24x32 Terminus font is my favorite. It's exactly 80 columns wide at 1080p, just over 33 rows. I run it on 4K screens though.

genpfault 1y ago
> 24x32 Terminus font Where are you seeing that size? The widest variant the Terminus project page[1] lists is 16x32. [1]: https://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/ https://terminus-font.sourceforge.net/
- jcalvinowens 1y ago
  Oh you're right, doh, it is the 16x32 one I was thinking of. So 720p not 1080p for 80col, and you don't quite get 25 rows.

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

Is it just me or is this a misunderstanding of computer architecture? The computer can only output what the screen can support (native resolution), the screen can only display what the video card gives it, the video card can only display what the video card driver tells it to do. They all have to work in tandem. If the system you're using (ARM??) doesn't have a particular fbdev driver, it still works thanks to the simpledrm weirdness. But if you want very particular results, you're gonna need to ship a driver for your card, to tell the card what to do, to tell the monitor what to do. The complaint seems to be that architectures change? I dunno what to tell you man. I hate technology too, but it do be changin'.

thakoppno 1y ago

80 x 24 is the original teletype size. Personal preference are tautological.

mieses 1y ago

The SGI Irix boot console was 80 characters wide and kind of elegant. It worked on different resolutions and looked like a floating window where the margins could be of arbitrary size.

whyandgrowth 1y ago

Sorry, but I don't understand why you even need an 80x25 console instead of a standard one. Maybe I don't understand something, so please explain?

avhon1 1y ago
80x25 is by far the most common standard for console size
- whyandgrowth 1y ago
  Thanks
- burnt-resistor 1y ago
  No. It's the standard CGA/MCGA/EGA/VGA/SVGA int 10h mode 3, where on VGA/SVGA cards it was a 80x25 console comprised of 9x16 glyphs (8x16 really, where the right-most bit is duplicated) for an analog effective resolution of 720x400 in 4:3 aspect ratio. Historically, when processors, motherboard buses, and video cards of physical machines were much slower, text modes were accelerated ways to write text such that they were much faster than writing and scrolling text graphically in a video framebuffer. Interestingly, on VGA/SVGA cards, it's possible to do double buffering of text by page flipping but it's pretty pointless even on real hardware. Emulated hardware generally doesn't suffer from tearing effects that happen on real hardware where large updates (mostly in graphics modes rather than text modes) aren't synchronized with the raster scan and end up looking bad by showing partial portions of the previous frame and current frame while an update is happening. In graphic modes, this was mostly eliminated by double- and triple-buffering with precisely-timed page flipping on video cards that had enough memory to have 2 or more whole frames.. (B800:0000 and A000:0000 are permanently etched in my brain.)
- cesarb 1y ago
  AFAIK, no, the most common standard for console size is 80x24, which came from the VT100 and is used by default on terminal emulators like xterm or the GNOME terminal.

bdamm 1y ago

Honestly, good riddance. And let's chuck into the dustbin of history fiddling with IRQ dipswitches to disambiguate your mouse, video, disk, and audio controllers; the "turbo" button; "It is now safe to turn off your computer"; CGA/EGA/VGA/HGA/MCGA/SVGA/XGA, RLL/MFM/SCSI/IDE, and while we're at it, TSR programs like sound drivers, mouse drivers, etc. Let's not even discuss OS/2. You know what sucked? Booting up into CGA and not being able to figure out how to escape that abomination. Why not pine for that? All of this trash is behind us and frankly I think we're better off for it. If you want to go play with obsolete computers, then finding some old computers and some old computer junkies who still enjoy that junk is the right way to go. Personally, I had my fun, but I like our modern machines so much more than those old smokey capacitor poppers. But I have to admit, I almost miss compiling my own kernel. Almost.

jbm 1y ago
Thank you, 100 times this. There was literally nothing fun about it. I remember desperately trying to put drivers in high memory, because Wing Commander 2 needed more memory if I was to get the precious images of the joystick moving. Slowly removing items, one by one from my autoexec.bat file, desperately hoping it was going to work, but then the creeping realisation that I would have to unload my soundcard drivers if I wanted a chance. Or the time our bios randomly wiped its memory and my dad was convinced I had destroyed the harddrive. Thankfully I was told by a family friend that I would only have to turn on the BIOS and set it to # 31 (because somehow hard disk sizes, sectors, et cetra were all standardized) in order to access our precious 95 megabyte hard disk.
- cluckindan 1y ago
  SimCity CD-ROM edition was the greatest. It needed sound card drivers, mouse drivers, CD-ROM drivers and MSCDEX, and it required 605kB of free conventional memory. Oh, and only some hard drives were standard like that. For others, you needed to set sectors, tracks and landing zone manually. Happy fun times if your CMOS battery ran out.
- rob74 1y ago
  Ah, yes, and I also remember what a relief it was when the newer generation of games (starting with Doom IIRC) used "DOS extenders" to switch the CPU into protected mode and be able to use 16 MB or more without any fiddling... Another anecdote from around that time (or a bit later): some friends were alarmed that their PC was not booting Windows as usual. Turns out they had forgotten a bootable CD in the CD-ROM drive, which was showing some cryptic text mode menu on startup. Easy fix: remove CD, restart, works...

joshu 1y ago

i got an sbc running recently and the font was so small on my monitor i had difficulty reading it. i wouldn’t be surprised if it was 100+ rows and many, many columns.

gorgoiler 1y ago

Related to this, the other day I learned that QEMU will render VGA mode text to your terminal using curses: $ qemu -curses … What a lovely feature, if you can get it to boot something with a VGA mode.

arghwhat 1y ago
It is very cute. It doesn't take much to use a serial console though, or even enabling SPICE for a fully featured (and detachable).
professoretc 1y ago
This also lets you run QEMU over SSH, if you want. I use this in my assembly language course; towards the end I give an assignment to write Hello, World! as a 16-bit real mode MBR bootloader. Students can do the whole thing on our SSH server, including testing in QEMU (and even attaching GDB to it to debug) not needing to install anything locally.

userbinator 1y ago

What's notable about the text modes is that they are fully done in hardware, so scrolling and writing lots of text is extremely fast and consumes very little CPU. Unfortunately on the hardware side, the allegedly-VGA-compatible part of newer GPUs is increasingly not as compatible as it should be. The "extended text modes" of earlier VGA cards supporting 132 columns or more have become nearly nonexistent, although even the original IBM VGA hardware API should be able to handle a 100 x 75 text mode, if not more, albeit with a reduced refresh rate. I remember almost 2 decades ago trying to get an Intel 900-series integrated GPU to display more than 80 columns in text mode, to challenge the datasheet claim that it was "not supported" (the original IBM VGA had an unofficial 90x60 mode at 720x480), and was unsuccessful; the hardware seemed to be deliberately restricting the settings, and triggered a hard lockup whenever I tried.

untrimmed 1y ago

This isn't just about an 80x25 console, is it? It feels like another layer of abstraction piled between me and the actual hardware.

Animats 1y ago

There's something to be said for not having a dumb VGA controller. Some years ago, I had a headless system running QNX in a control application. About 30% of the CPU time was being consumed by something. It turned out that the system had a very minimal VGA controller, not connected to anything. The QNX boot image was capable of running with no console at all, which was the intent. But it found the VGA controller and launched a screen saver. The screen saver worked by shifting the entire screen one pixel at a time, which, with this minimal VGA controller, was a very slow read from VRAM, one byte at a time. This was so slow that it ate up a huge amount of CPU time. This being QNX, it wasn't at high priority, so the real time stuff preempted it.

db48x 1y ago

It probably is impossible unless you actually have a VGA device and a CRT. There’s no way your LCD is going to distort its pixels so that they’re rectangular.

Yizahi 1y ago

I don't get the intention of the author. No, I mean, I get that he wants a 80x25 terminal "eventually" but I don't get how exactly. He says it himself that he has multiple different displays, so even if he did manage to get his text only terminal, it will be microscopic on one of the displays, giant on another etc. For me personally, the whole point of terminal rendered by graphic pipeline is that I can get terminal the same size, same font size, and same everything regardless if I use 1080p scaled to 150%, or native 4K or some ancient LCD display on some old laptop (remember 1024x600?). Ok, maybe it is not religiously pure way and maybe it is not as robust and stable way as pure text, but we do get usable terminal in return at least.

deleted 1y ago
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juancn 1y ago
I read it as a nostalgia piece. When terminals were common, they pretty much all were 80 or 40 columns and 25 rows, not a lot of choice, most were about the same size. I actually like modern emulated terminals, with all the bells and whistles.
- OCTAGRAM 1y ago
  I yet to see any modern terminal with bells and whistles like in Acronis OS Selector 5
m463 1y ago
He wants a readable text console at boot. Also 80x25 has a lot of history, and some things work better at that size. I don't know if you've ever tried using a non-graphical display on linux recently, but if you have say a 4k display, you get unreadably tiny text. It also breaks a lot of text-mode stuff. If you've ever tried to FIX this on your system, you'll find a bunch of roadblocks. You can't just use an easily available font for the console. Console fonts have to be created or converted into a non-standard .pfs or .pfsu format. most linux distributions have at most a 16x32 font available if you take the time to do the override properly. Even that font is pretty small on 4k. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console

arghwhat 1y ago

If the kmscon project wasn't dead, they'd be able to get whatever number of cells and rows they'd like as it doesn't use now-obscure built-in display device modes by setting the font settings. On the other hand, kmscon is just a graphical terminal emulator and display server built into one. Running `cage foot` (i.e., the very minimal "foot" terminal emulator running under the single-app "cage" display server) and setting foot's settings to whatever you'd like would get you a better (and importantly, fully maintained) experience.

1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago

"Well, the old vga= option that you are used to doesn't work when you booted from UEFI or on non-x86 platforms." This is one reason I appreciate older computers; I prefer VGA textmode But, for today's computers, kmscon and libtsm, and frecon from a trillion-dollar advertising services company, are interesting.^1 For example, being able to zoom in and out using keyboard shortcuts is useful When I used computers with only VGA textmode running NetBSD, I always wished for a console that could possibly display images, like a Linux framebuffer, perhaps; vesafb on NetBSD was still a WIP. I was tired of switching back and forth from textmode to X11. Eventually I gave up on X11 and began using separate computers on same local network but with not gateway to the internet in order to view graphics As a Linux user today, it's funny to read the complaints about framebuffers I am not "either/or" when it comes to BSD v Linux. I use both. Each has its merits. But I think NetBSD may be the nicest OS for people who prefer the console. At least it is for me Making it easy for mortals to run the OS on older computers^2 is important 1. https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/raw/master/src/kmscon_conf.c https://github.com/dvdhrm/kmscon/raw/master/src/kmscon_conf.... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon/+/HEAD/DESIGN-DOC.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon... https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon/+/006bdb2c68d9f0eb0a68cace02b953c11e5f630d/README.md https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/frecon... 2. For example, computers that are unsuitable for delivering today's internet ads

teddyh 1y ago

Followup post: Running an Accurate 80×25 DOS-Style Console on Modern Linux Is Possible After All <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289481 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45289481>