I've tried 3 graphic cards and none of them drops the foreground intensity when character maps are changed.

How do you get WP51 to display the extended characters? When I run 'wp charmap.tst' I get little blocks or normal characters instead of the alternate ones.

Steps to display the 512-character font in WordPerfect 5.1:

Shift-F1
2 - Display

(At this point make sure that 3 - Text Screen Type says "Auto Selected"; if it doesn't, use 3 - Text Screen Type, then 2 - Auto-select.)

after pressing 2 - Display, then

1 - Colors/Fonts/Attributes

then, you should see a menu of five choices; choose

5 - 512 Characters...

then F7 until you're back at the editing screen

If you don't see a menu of five choices, with one of them as 512 characters, then go back to 3 - Text Screen Type, choose IBM VGA (& Compatibles), then highlight 80x25 16 Color, and choose 1 - Select. At this point you should be able to select the 512-character font.

Now you can open charmap.tst (Shift-F10, charmap.tst - or F5 and select the file) and see the extended characters.

I've spelled out the instructions in excessive detail in the hope of preventing frustration on anyone's part!

On my Windows XP system, I use an Nvidia GeForce 7600 card (because the 7600 series was the last one to provide a continuous underline in mode 7, which is NOT relevant here, of course). When I run WP in full-screen mode, the second font bank is displayed in normal intensity, not bold. I used Tseng 3000 and 4000 cards for many years before I switched to Nvidia, and they also displayed the second font bank in normal intensity. So did my original IBM VGA card, from 1990. Also, the video hardware in all the ThinkPads I've ever tried also do this correctly - but my newest ThinkPad is admittedly a few years old.

Are you saying that some cards display the second font bank in bold intensity? I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the most modern cards don't even try to handle this feature. I've noticed that some new cards don't even support the underline attribute in mode 7....

PS: Most of what I know about text mode in WordPerfect is here, but not much of it is relevant to this question:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/textmode.html

Thanks, I got the alternate characters now. I'm only saying that real hardware doesn't work like ripsaws patch implements it. WP does not have "bold" characters on one of these graphics cards (the others not tested), so the problem is elsewhere.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

I'm only saying that real hardware doesn't work like ripsaws patch implements it.

Understood - thanks. A lot of us will be interested to learn what you find out. Meanwhile, @ripsaw8080's patch gets the job done for my WordPerfect project. (That patch, and his patch that enables the underline attribute in mode mono in vesa display modes, have been absolutely essential.)

Here's the secret:

iow 8 3c0 12, cs:ip c000:267e
iow 8 3c0 7, cs:ip c000:267e

The intensity bit is masked off in the attribute controller so all intensified colors are mapped back to the normal ones. DOSBox ignores this entirely.

That was fast...!

It took so long because I initially misinterpreted the 12 as decimal which would just make it change one color 😉

That address had to be from a video rom bios, so I traced from similar port writes in a different bios, and found that WP is calling INT 10h/AX=1000h with BX=0F12h and BX=0712h, so apparently DOSBox does not implement the undocumented register writing feature of function 1000h as described here. This would be in addition to supporting the register value itself.

DOSBox does implement that part (it shows up in the I/O log also without video BIOS), but in vga_attr.cpp:

1/* Why disable colour planes? */

So the address in video rom bios was a red herring. 😉

Here is a trivial change to the previous patch that is based on the color plane enable register instead of the map select register. It appears to work OK, but can try it out to see if there are any problems until hal commits something proper.