Prior to EGA with its support for soft fonts/codepages, the only way to support non-US charsets was to replace the display adapter's character ROM. IBM did just that with its CGA and MDA adapters sold in various countries, as did Hercules and other vendors.

I'm looking for dumps of these foreign character ROMs (or even just the bitmaps) for a little project I'm working on -- preferrably from original IBM cards, but clones will also do. Already have some dumps for Cyrillic... so Greek, Hebrew, and Central/Eastern European latin charsets would help me out especially.

interesting... what is this project? is it just cool or super-cool?
I'll upload the 3 romdumps I have of 3 different cards with Greek charsets tomorrow when I am at my office pc where the files/cards are

here are the promised rom dumps, hope they are of use!

Acer 500+ II cga combo card


MDA clone #1


MDA clone #2


ps. if by any chance someone submits a Greek rom for the original IBM CGA please tell me, I'd like to change the rom in mine so I get Greek characters in old programs

Is there any software way to dump them without rom programmer? Have many cards, but no Eprom programmer.

vlask wrote:Is there any software way to dump them without rom programmer? Have many cards, but no Eprom programmer.

Not with CGA/MDA as far as I know (no BIOS, ROM not mapped to the CPU's addressable space).

keropi wrote:interesting... what is this project? is it just cool or super-cool?

It's "cool" only for a very narrow/nerdy defintion of "cool" - think something like this project, but for PC fonts instead of Amiga ones.

Already got some Cyrillic ones and Danish/Norwegian/Portuguese (over at VCF), and now Greek from you -- I have a Hebrew CGA font from IBM, but only the 'normal' 8x8 chars (no 'thin' version or 9x14/MDA glyphs). EGA/VGA are much easier, since the fonts can simply be extracted from DOS codepages, but for CGA/MDA/Herc the only way to get the "authentic" international fonts is from the ROMs.

Anyway, thanks for those dumps! Here are the bitmaps-

A bit odd that those MDA clones don't have IBM-style 8K ROMS and with the 8x8 fonts included... but I guess that part was simply stripped out since it's never used on MDA anyway.
BTW, I think you should be able to burn a Greek ROM for your IBM CGA using the Acer one as a base? unless you want a 'thin' font as well?

Awesome, can't wait to see the project live, I am a sucker for ascii stuff
Glad the dumps can help, even if they lack some data
As for the IBM rom, I'd like to put the "original Greek" one at some point, not a priority but it would be nice to have ... maybe I get lucky and find it

I recently got a Hyundai XT clone , model "PONY" and it had inside a single card: an ATI Small Wonder rev1 , so here's the rom dump as it carries Greek characters.

Ah, missed that. Interesting - this one has two identical copies of the same data, and each of them in turn has two identical copies of the same 8x8 font (plus one 8x14 font).
I was initially more focused on the IBM stuff, but this might prove useful as well. Haven't had much time to throw at this project lately (new job and all), but I've puzzled out the workflow for putting it all together, so I suppose we'll see some Very Old Glyphs On New Systems yet...

great, can't wait to see what you come up with
regarding the duplicate data, maybe it's on purpose to fill the bigger eprom they had in stock or the card uses different regions of the data depending on mode... who knows what they were thinking back then

I have a CGA clone card from Bulgaria with a weird character set. I'll back it up later (and replace it with an EEPROM with the regular english one, if possible). Fun fact: it uses a regular 27256 EEPROM, and not what IBM CGA cards used.

Here you go - from a Pravetz CGA clone card

Weird indeed... each of the 3 Cyrillic fonts has a different encoding.
The second one in particular (top right) looks very Apple][-ish. Perhaps related to the fact that Pravetz made Apple clones as well...

VileRancour wrote:Weird indeed... each of the 3 Cyrillic fonts has a different encoding.
The second one in particular (top right) looks very Apple][-ish. Perhaps related to the fact that Pravetz made Apple clones as well...

The top right font seems to using KOI8-R character set rather that standard OEM 866, while the bottom left looks like "main" GOST 19768-87 encoding but in fact it does not match it.
...and the bottom right is even weird than other