^ thanks for the offer appreciate it!
but since then I bought an "official Greek" 5155 portable that came with Greek keyboard and character rom:

Memotek was IBM's distributor at the time. The rom is here if you want it: http://www.mediafire.com/file/k97l119xsnv0cf5 … tek-gr.rar/file , IIRC it has a couple of banks with different charsets.

Just had this one in my hands. Think its the same MDA Keropi posted above, but different ROM.

Just a few moments ago I hit the 100-fonts-count, that I have dumped.
These two ROMs come in very handy. I am searching localized ROMs as well as I have a MDA rom, that seems broken.
Thank you very much! I also already added all the localized ROMs I found in this topic.
If you have more localized ROMs or other interesting ROMs I am happy to take em for extracting and comparison 😀

If you're interested: https://github.com/spacerace/romfont
There is:
* extracted fonts (font-bin)
* pictures of all extracted fonts in PNG (font-images) (automatically generated)
* headers (C) for every font automatically generated from fonts
* the tools I have written.
On startpage there is a huge README with a list of already extracted fonts and comments.
The file MD5SUMS.MD contains a list with sums to fonts, I have sorted this file. This way one can easily see which font is used by which card.

Also I found a possible copyright infrightment in open source software - also described there. Not describe it here, in case it turns out that I got something wrong, I can easily remove the note from github.

Dang, I dropped the ball big time and missed those later replies from you guys.   [...*Clicks "watch thread"*...]   There, that's better.

Thanks again for all of these. I've now assimilated all the unique ones from this thread into the big collection here: https://github.com/viler-int10h/vga-text-mode-fonts
They're all 8.3 filenames which aren't very descriptive, but FONTS.TXT details where they all came from.

@keropi:
I remember that "Monster-ROM Memotek" card from another thread - that was a pretty neat hack for shoving 9 different fonts into a poor old CGA. 😉
I wonder if you've managed to find out anything that documents what all those different encodings were?

@stecdose:
I see that you've also built up a very nice collection there 😁 See if you want to extend it with the ones I've compiled (link above) - there are quite a few weird old laptop fonts and VGA fonts over there.

About extracting the fonts (if you're still interested 2 years later)...
Given a ROM file, I have a couple of ways to get a hold of the fonts:

• The easiest for me is to open it in a so-called "ROM hacking tool" made for graphics work, like Binxelview or Crystal Tile. No disassembly needed; just locate them by eye and copy/paste.
• If the ROM contains a VGA BIOS, you can also "loadrom" it in DOSBox, then use my font editor to "[^G]et VGA" and save them straight to the binary format. But this has to be done separately for each font.

Once the raw binary fonts are extracted, you can do whatever image manipulation you want on them. They're basically 1-bit image data arranged in a certain way, so ImageMagick (for instance) has no problems processing them.
I have a batch script to generate those "preview" PNGs included in my collection, such as the example below. It's a big ol' mess however, and requires 4(!) external tools (ImageMagick, ffmpeg, pngcrush and pngquant), so let me know if that still interests you.

VileR wrote on 2020-09-25, 15:59:

[...] @keropi: I remember that "Monster-ROM Memotek" card from another thread - that was a pretty neat hack for shoving 9 differ […]
Show full quote

[...]
@keropi:
I remember that "Monster-ROM Memotek" card from another thread - that was a pretty neat hack for shoving 9 different fonts into a poor old CGA. 😉
I wonder if you've managed to find out anything that documents what all those different encodings were?
[...]

Hey VileR!
no I did not find more info... maybe it was used to print different fonts with a matching printer? I remember that those cables from the memotek addon were soldered to the LPT port
I have no idea what this was all about!

Soldered to the LPT port? The plot thickens 😀 I guess printer support for those charsets might have been accomplished more easily with a "graphics.com" modification, but who knows!
If you find out more that would be cool to know - that card is definitely a unique hardware solution in any case...

I'm *still* trying to locate one of those combo MDA/CGA boards like on my first Turbo XT, with that built-in Hebrew font. Of course, that was a random unknown brand - might have been 100% unmarked, like a few of the cards on the previous page... so the chances are pretty slim.
But if anyone has something with an interesting charset, localized or not, feel free to keep 'em coming!

Recently I got dual Hercules/CGA clone (this thread). This card has a empty socket for a 2764 ROM chip for a character ROM. I have some AT28C64B-12PC ROM chips and a TL866A but I don't know to proceed. What BIN file I should be burn in the EPROM chip to get spanish keyboard (see the picture)?

Thanks in advanced

The font you show is a 8x8 CGA font. A CGA font is 8 bytes per character at 256 character, i.e. 2 kilobytes. Your ROM chip has 8 kilobytes, and your card is very likely to use one of the four 2-kilobyte parts you obtain when dividing the 8 kilobytes into 4 equal parts for CGA display. If you obtain the 2K binary source file for the font you show, concatenate it four times and burn it to your ROM. If you don't have the source file, it is possible to reconstruct it from the screen shot, but it would help a lot to have it in a lossless unscaled form.

The font you show is not a good match for the Hercules mode of your card, because it needs a 9x14 font stored as 8x16 font in that case. This font occupies 4 kilobytes of the ROM, and just padding a 8x8 font to 8x16 looks awful.

mkarcher wrote on 2020-12-05, 11:42:

The font you show is a 8x8 CGA font. A CGA font is 8 bytes per character at 256 character, i.e. 2 kilobytes. Your ROM chip has 8 kilobytes, and your card is very likely to use one of the four 2-kilobyte parts you obtain when dividing the 8 kilobytes into 4 equal parts for CGA display. If you obtain the 2K binary source file for the font you show, concatenate it four times and burn it to your ROM. If you don't have the source file, it is possible to reconstruct it from the screen shot, but it would help a lot to have it in a lossless unscaled form.

The font you show is not a good match for the Hercules mode of your card, because it needs a 9x14 font stored as 8x16 font in that case. This font occupies 4 kilobytes of the ROM, and just padding a 8x8 font to 8x16 looks awful.

Hi mkarcher !! First of all, thanks your answer

Second: the picture that I show in my previous post is of the set of font I'm interested (ñ Ñ : I took from a message of previous page of this thread), but I don't know how get the current font set of my card. How I should proceed?

muon wrote on 2020-12-05, 13:51:

Second: the picture that I show in my previous post is of the set of font I'm interested (ñ Ñ : I took from a message of previous page of this thread), but I don't know how get the current font set of my card. How I should proceed?

The message you took the image from also contains a ZIP file. That ZIP file contains the member "8x8font.bin". I don't know the tools that go with the TL866 programmer, but you should be able to use at least one of the following methods to get a working ROM for your card:

1. "COPY /B 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin romimage.bin" in the windows command box, then load the 8 kilobyte big file "romimage.bin".
2. Load the file 8x8font.bin four times in the programming applications, and specify the following base addresses: 0, 2048 decimal/800 hex, 4096 decimal/1000 hex and 6144 decimal/1800 hex.

Write that file to an EEPROM, and test whether it works.

You can't easily extract the built-in character set of these cards, but you don't need to: You are not going to overwrite the built-in set, so you can always go back to the standard characters by adjusting the "CG" jumper. You mpst likely need to change the "CG" to the other position to enable the use of the external character ROM.

mkarcher wrote on 2020-12-05, 15:47:

The message you took the image from also contains a ZIP file. That ZIP file contains the member "8x8font.bin". I don't know the […]
Show full quote

muon wrote on 2020-12-05, 13:51:

Second: the picture that I show in my previous post is of the set of font I'm interested (ñ Ñ : I took from a message of previous page of this thread), but I don't know how get the current font set of my card. How I should proceed?

The message you took the image from also contains a ZIP file. That ZIP file contains the member "8x8font.bin". I don't know the tools that go with the TL866 programmer, but you should be able to use at least one of the following methods to get a working ROM for your card:

1. "COPY /B 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin + 8x8font.bin romimage.bin" in the windows command box, then load the 8 kilobyte big file "romimage.bin".
2. Load the file 8x8font.bin four times in the programming applications, and specify the following base addresses: 0, 2048 decimal/800 hex, 4096 decimal/1000 hex and 6144 decimal/1800 hex.

Write that file to an EEPROM, and test whether it works.

You can't easily extract the built-in character set of these cards, but you don't need to: You are not going to overwrite the built-in set, so you can always go back to the standard characters by adjusting the "CG" jumper. You mpst likely need to change the "CG" to the other position to enable the use of the external character ROM.

Thanks a lot. I'll do it

@muon: have you verified that you actually need to do this? That image (and .bin) is of the standard CP437 character set, which includes those chars for Spanish.

In the other thread, you didn't clarify which character set is already contained in the card's internal ROM (or integrated on the chipset), unless I missed something. Have you checked this? CP437 *is* the most common standard, so it's likely that you already have those characters available.

I'll checkit that

VileR wrote on 2020-12-05, 18:21:

@muon: have you verified that you actually need to do this? That image (and .bin) is of the standard CP437 character set, which includes those chars for Spanish.

Good call, I should have checked that before explaining how to program a ROM that most likely wouldn't change anything.

VileR wrote on 2020-12-05, 18:21:

@muon: have you verified that you actually need to do this? That image (and .bin) is of the standard CP437 character set, which includes those chars for Spanish.

In the other thread, you didn't clarify which character set is already contained in the card's internal ROM (or integrated on the chipset), unless I missed something. Have you checked this? CP437 *is* the most common standard, so it's likely that you already have those characters available.

Today I've checked and YES those characters are in the font rom .

mkarcher wrote on 2020-12-05, 21:34:

VileR wrote on 2020-12-05, 18:21:

@muon: have you verified that you actually need to do this? That image (and .bin) is of the standard CP437 character set, which includes those chars for Spanish.

Good call, I should have checked that before explaining how to program a ROM that most likely wouldn't change anything.

Anyway I've learned a lot. Thanks

Hi,
My IBM 5155 has an original MDA/LPT1 card and a original CGA card. Both of them has a ROM mod. Pin 21 is removed from the socket, and connected directly on to pin 24.
Maybe this is a necessary mod when using MDA and CGA at the same time?
I removed the MDA card, and the CGA still works fine with the mod.

PS! The BIOS on the picture has Norwegian characters. I swapped it with the ROM in the MDA card witch has English characters. The markings says "farve" with means color. To be clear the ROM removed from the MDA and used in the CGA has the same modification on pin 21/24.

I have an old VGA Card that has a very uncommon font.

Jinxter wrote on 2022-02-08, 10:46:

Hi,
My IBM 5155 has an original MDA/LPT1 card and a original CGA card. Both of them has a ROM mod. Pin 21 is removed from the socket, and connected directly on to pin 24.
Maybe this is a necessary mod when using MDA and CGA at the same time?

The original Monochrome Display and Printer Adapter and the original Color Graphics Adapter work perfectly side-by-side without any mod. Your picture shows that an EPROM is in the character ROM socket. The shape of the case and the fact that it is a ceramic case are dead giveaways that this ROM is not the factory-provided mask-programmed ROM. The bodge wire connecting pin 24 (VCC) to pin 21 (likely an address pin or Vpp) is very likely needed to make standard EPROMs work in that socket.