> On Jun 19, 2025, at 1:03 PM, Eric Auer via Freedos-user > <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Hi! > >> How can I make the system font bigger? >> (e.g. setting the display to 20 lines instead of 25) >> I am using cga. > > Hmm. CGA. Not even EGA or VGA. In VGA, you would get: > > C:\>mode con lines=42 > Lines must be 25, 28, 43 or 50, or font size 8, 14 or 16. > If you have VESA, 30, 34 or 60 lines can be available, too. > > Given that CGA has 320x200 and 640x200 modes, you could > try to load some 8x14 or 8x16 font, but that would mean > only 12 or 14 lines. > > In addition, the CGA BIOS does not contain fonts larger > than 8x8, so you would have to use the DOS DISPLAY driver > to load the larger fonts. However, that driver probably > ALSO will assume that you only want 8x8 fonts and fail > to load the larger fonts. > > According to wikipedia, CGA only supports ROM fonts. > I guess it just does not have enough graphics RAM. > > You could only switch to a slow graphics mode and let > the BIOS render the text in software. Should work for > software which does not directly access text screen > buffer memory and only uses DOS or BIOS to show text. > > Regards, Eric
As Eric said, I am fairly sure it is not really possible with CGA. However, on VGA there are tricks... You can load a font that has variety of lines for vertical height. From around 8 to around 30. It depends on hardware. I think 26 was about the maximum reliable height. Loading such a font does affect the total number of lines on the screen. To demonstrate, run PGME, go to the Eternal Menu and execute the Eternal Doc (BigText). It will temporarily load a larger font in text mode resulting in (I think) 80x15 text mode. However, you would still be in the default video mode and many programs will not check and assume it is 80x25. So, I would not recommend permanently installing a taller font for general usage. That being said, the VGA font has a lot of padding. Many years ago, I created a font and TSR to provide bigger text without Increasing the font size. It won’t help you because it requires VGA. But, if anyone else wants to give it a try, you can download it from GitLab at https://github.com/shidel/DustyTP7/blob/master/bin/LARGE.COM <https://github.com/shidel/DustyTP7/blob/master/bin/LARGE.COM> Interestingly, it won’t effect the font under any of the DOSBoxs. But, works fine on real hardware and the VMs I have tested. :-) > > > > > _______________________________________________ > Freedos-user mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
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