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PVLDR - PictView loader against display garbage on IBM ThinkPad 770

Description

PictView from Jan Patera is one of the finest graphics viewers for DOS. It can not only show files passed via command line, but also has a nice user interface to browse through directories.

PictView supplies its own 8x14 font for user interface. Usually this works very well, but IBM ThinkPad 770's graphics BIOS is somewhat "special".

ThinkPad 770's BIOS even awaits 8x14 font data to be in 8x16 format! Maybe IBM was misinterpreting VGA standard, but it just looks like a bug to me.

PVLDR now intercepts PictView's 'install my 8x14 font' function call, copies 8x14 font data to an internal buffer whilst changing it to 8x16 format. It then passes this buffer to BIOS.

Note: If PictView user interface already looks fine on your computer, you should NOT use PVLDR at all!

System requirements

Intel i80286 microprocessor (or compatibles)
IBM VGA graphics card (or compatibles)
Microsoft MS-DOS 3.0 (or compatibles)
PictView 1.94 or 1.95 preview (other versions may also work)

Version history

22-JUL-2007 / 29-JUL-2012

first public release

Downloads

Binaries + Manual: pvldrb.zip (3.3 Kbytes)
Source code (Sphinx C--): pvldrs.zip (5.3 Kbytes)