jesolo wrote on 2023-03-08, 18:16:

I'm hoping that someone out there can perhaps dump the Video BIOS ROM of their ET4000/W32i card that perhaps has a more "standard" font (or point me to a location where I can download an ET4000/ W32i BIOS ROM from).

Well, you can dump your ROM easily using debug or NSSI. Finding the embedded fonts in VGA ROM images isn't that difficult (e.g. by looking for the zero bytes for the NUL character and the zero bytes for the space character 32 characters later). Overwriting the "typical Tseng font" with an IBM font is straightforward, as is fixing the checksum. Patching a new font into the ROM for your card is the better approach compared to trying a foreign ROM on your card, because not all ET4000/W32 are equal, e.g. the clocks provided by the clock chip might differ.

mkarcher wrote on 2023-03-08, 20:22:

jesolo wrote on 2023-03-08, 18:16:

I'm hoping that someone out there can perhaps dump the Video BIOS ROM of their ET4000/W32i card that perhaps has a more "standard" font (or point me to a location where I can download an ET4000/ W32i BIOS ROM from).

Well, you can dump your ROM easily using debug or NSSI. Finding the embedded fonts in VGA ROM images isn't that difficult (e.g. by looking for the zero bytes for the NUL character and the zero bytes for the space character 32 characters later). Overwriting the "typical Tseng font" with an IBM font is straightforward, as is fixing the checksum. Patching a new font into the ROM for your card is the better approach compared to trying a foreign ROM on your card, because not all ET4000/W32 are equal, e.g. the clocks provided by the clock chip might differ.

I completely understand what you are suggesting. Unfortunately, my knowledge of how to perform this is a bit limited. But, let me explore a bit more based on your suggestion.

I actually had the same complaint about lower case L in my ET4000/W32i card and I ended up doing a font hack for it. I don't know if my font is to your liking and if the BIOS will even work but I have attached it to this post.
EDIT: Found photos of how it looks like
There were a few chars that were still original, I found there were several "fixup" chars in other part of the BIOS that also had to be changed, the photos predate this but the attached BIOS has them fixed. I am not sure why char 92 didn't show up on the photos in QB45 charset screen, but it certainly worked elsewhere.

Tiido wrote on 2023-03-09, 06:24:

I actually had the same complaint about lower case L in my ET4000/W32i card and I ended up doing a font hack for it. I don't know if my font is to your liking and if the BIOS will even work but I have attached it to this post.
EDIT: Found photos of how it looks like
There were a few chars that were still original, I found there were several "fixup" chars in other part of the BIOS that also had to be changed, the photos predate this but the attached BIOS has them fixed. I am not sure why char 92 didn't show up on the photos in QB45 charset screen, but it certainly worked elsewhere.

Thank you so much. I'm going to give this one a try and report back.

Tiido wrote on 2023-03-09, 06:24:

I actually had the same complaint about lower case L in my ET4000/W32i card and I ended up doing a font hack for it. I don't know if my font is to your liking and if the BIOS will even work but I have attached it to this post.
EDIT: Found photos of how it looks like
There were a few chars that were still original, I found there were several "fixup" chars in other part of the BIOS that also had to be changed, the photos predate this but the attached BIOS has them fixed. I am not sure why char 92 didn't show up on the photos in QB45 charset screen, but it certainly worked elsewhere.

Thank you for the BIOS ROM - I've attached a screenshot with your BIOS ROM loaded.

Nice ~

I just noticed that your BIOS is actually a bit newer than mine is. It would be good to have a dump of it too.