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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

I have a distinct memory of very early Linux kernels being able to use higher-resolution native VGA text modes. This would have been around the early 1992 / Linux 0.12 time frame. After being used to my PC showing 80x25 text in MS-DOS, the skinny letters and information-packed display made Linux look like something from the future. :) I suppose it was just a feature of some VGA cards around that time, and Linus decided to support it for a while. The computer historian in me sometimes wonders whatever happened to it.

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It sounds like you may be remembering VBE display modes.[1] I think you can still play with these modes by adding `nomodeset vga=ask` to the kernel parameters[2] if you are booting with BIOS (or UEFI with CSM).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions

[2]: https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/svga.html

43 and 50 lines were pretty standard on VGA, so it should be widely supported. I also remember setting 132x50 consoles but that ended up using very few pixels per character (and 80x50 is just that hateful CGA font, vertically compressed) but, at least, it didn’t have serifs.

43 and 50 lines were not high resolution modes, they were just short-character modes. They still use native VGA 720x400 resolution.

There were tools to program VGA card to higher resolution text mode (svgatextmode), and also s3fb supports higher resolution text mode in kernel.

Around 2002 when I was playing with Linux from old Red Hat CDs from a thick book, I did play with SVGATextMode (it is mentioned below)

The system I was experimenting on was a mid-90's 120MHz ancient Packard Bell PC with 56MB of RAM in SIMMs (had that famed bad CMD640 IDE chip). Had a Cirrus Logic VGA adapter onboard.

I remember being able to set all kinds of crazy text resolutions - like lower than 80x25, which was funny.

I also remember in the quest for the highest text resolution - there was some setting about memory clock speed being a controllable setting, higher clock speeds needed for higher text resolutions, and if it was set too fast dots would crawl on the screen.

Early x86/PC Linux versions used VGA's native text capabilities. When ported to m68k machines (Atari/Amiga) that didn't have native text capabilities, that's when Linux grew the virtual console we all know today that renders text to a bitmap display.

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