[fpc-pascal] Accessing ROM BIOS Font in Linux.

[Anthony W.Henry]

On Thu, 2008-01-17 at 11:47 +0100, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 17 Jan 2008, Vinzent Hoefler wrote:
> 
> > On Thursday 17 January 2008 01:27, Anthonyh63 at comcast.net wrote:
> > 
> > > The question.   Is this font accessible from linux; do I have
> > > to be root ?
> > 
> > Yes. Yes.
> > 
> > "/dev/mem" should be the raw memory device (where even the BIOS "image" 
> > can be read from), but this device which is only accessible to root.
> 
> But you cannot use this font to write to the screen directly ?

   Actually, I read the font and drew to the screen. :)
I first used this to make Banners in Text Mode out of the 
Letters themselves. (A was made out of A, B or B's etc...).

    At one time I almost completed a set of 256 color 2d
graphics primitives in Pascal and assembler.  I used the
BIOS font in my OutTextXY procedure.  I just
remembered where I had some of the code this morning.

http://home.comcast.net/~anthonyh63/mysoftware/vesa.zip

   These routines are not complete and are mostly useless
today.  (Real mode DOS.)  The routines in question are in
WRITETXT.SRC which was used as an include file rather then
a unit.  Include files were a habit I picked up from 
programming with Turbo 3.0 even though this work was done
under Turbo 6. :) 

  Upon rereading the source I had forgotten you also had
to make a BIOS call to get the address though it returned
an identical address for most BIOS's. (If memory serves). 

  Thanks to everyone who answered.  I'm checking the Linux
newsgroups now to see if there is a way to hack
a BIOS call under Linux but I don't have a lot of hope :)
(rightfully so, people shouldn't make direct BIOS calls
 in an application now.) 
I'll probably end up linking a binary font into the program.

Anthony. 

> 
> Michael.
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