Is there a standard BIOS Int 10h video mode for 43 lines or more?

Question

I'm writing code which runs in real mode before any OS is loaded. Part of my program involves a dump of information to the video display, and the standard 80x25 text mode is not cutting it.

Many versions of Windows and other OSes seem to have no trouble switching to some larger text mode, 43 line I think, when they show kernel panics. I know larger text modes have been around a long time so I would expect there's at least one standard mode.

There's a pretty large list of BIOS video modes here:

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/wpdos/videomodes.txt

Unfortunately, the same mode numbers seem to vary wildly in meaning between chipsets.

Once upon a time I seem to remember having used a thing called VESA BIOS to access Super VGA graphics modes in a device-independent manner, but I also seem to remember that involving a DOS TSR which had to be loaded in. That's not an option here as DOS is not running.

I'm looking for a mode that will work on the widest variety of hardware, including the virtual video adapter in VMware ESXi. The code to change modes needs to be compact also, so I was hoping a simple Int 10h would do it.

Any ideas? How do the Windows & VMware kernel panics do it?

Answer 1

You can use 80x25 mode and load an 8x8 font (ax = 1112h), that will result in 80x50 characters. As far as I can remember, that was pretty standard.