Perhaps you should be more specific as to what these modes are, and what games use them?

A Google search for <"extended SVGA text modes"> turns up all of 32 hits.

I don't think there are that many games that use high-resolution SVGA text modes. I've used mode 102h on DOSBox without a problem though (graphics mode). I'm pretty sure it should work unless you want the really insane modes (like 11Bh which is 1280x1024*24).

edit: is there really even a difference between graphics mode and text mode for these special SVGA modes?

dada wrote:

edit: is there really even a difference between graphics mode and text mode for these special SVGA modes?

SVGA text modes work the same way as any other text mode (memory based on character cells/attributes, individual pixels not addressable, ASCII font, 16 colors, hardware cursor/scrolling).
you can fake text modes using graphics modes if you really want to, but it used to be far more useful to do it the other way around and fake graphics using text modes 😀

iirc, some old .mod player ( cubic-player ? ) using svga text mode for its interface.

I remember settings the Norton Commander to launch that program when i hit "Enter" on *.MOD file.

There are several higher resolution text modes; the specific modes available depend on the machine= setting in the conf file. If you look at int10_modes.cpp in the DOSBox source, it will tell you the mode numbers, their screen dimensions, and font sizes.

Not long ago, hal9000 added VESA text modes to SVN. The Open Cubic Player will use those modes.

I made a collection of small utilities to set large text modes in DOSBox (works with machine=svga_s3 and the vesa_* alternates) available here. Note that 132x86 works in 0.74, but will not work in SVN or (presumably) later official releases because mode 0x54 now correctly uses the 8x8 font instead of the 8x16 font.