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- I finally got my hands on an EGA setup, and have reached nirvana. The only
- "bug" in the ointment is that CHEDIT does not (yet) support the 8 x 14
- character set available.
- As an interim solution, the program LOADEGA is included with the CHEDIT
- package. The program reads in a character set, and loads it as the resident
- character set when in EGA mode. The usage format is:
-
- LOADEGA filename <filename2> <block>
-
- from the DOS prompt, where filename is the name of the CHEDIT character set
- you wish to load as the resident character set. If the filename does not have
- an extension, .CHR is appended to the name. Block is the character block,
- either 0 (the lower, normal ascii characters) or 1 (the upper, graphics
- characters), with a default of 0 if it is not specified. Please note that
- this will give you a 43 line display, but unfortunately most programs do not
- support this mode, and so will "squish" things into the top of the screen.
-
- One other word of warning: If you load block 1, the character sizes are
- reset for the entire character set. Thus loading an 8 x 8 character set into
- the upper 128 characters will make the lower 128 characters 8 x 8 as well, and
- if an 8 x 8 character set has not been loaded, the screen will be very strange.
-
- Also, there is an optional second filename on the command line (again, if no
- extension is specifiecd, .CHR is appended), which tells LOADEGA that you
- wish to load characters in a 8 x 14 format. In this case the character
- files are not quite the standard CHEDIT character sets, but are still created
- with the program.
- The format of the two files is that each file contains 64 characters that are
- two "standard" characters high (the bottom two rows should be unused in the
- second character), easily created via the Multiple character editing option of
- CHEDIT. The characters must not be successive, but instead should be "on top"
- of each other as seen in the character set display at the top of CHEDIT. i.e.
-
- _____________________________ ...
- | | | |
- | upper | upper | upper |
- | 0 | 1 | 2 |
- | | | |
- | | | |
- | | | |
- |________|________|________|__ ...
- | | | |
- | lower | lower | lower |
- | 0 | 1 | 2 |
- | | | |
- |________|________|________|
- | blank | blank | blank |
- |________|________|________|__ ...
- | | | |
- . . . .
- . . . .
- . . . .
-
- The space labeled "blank" is the bottom 2 rows of the lower characters. If
- are not blank, they will simply be ignored.
-
- For an example, see the files EGA1.CHR and EGA2.CHR on the disk. The
- characters in these files are "quick and dirty", but do provide an example
- of the format.
-
- A version of CHEDIT that supports the full EGA format is forthcoming, just
- give me some time.
- Your friendly neighborhood programmer
-