Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

The requirements for DOS are much less than for true PC-compatibility, which is why there were many "DOS-compatible" x86 machines in the early days, but they soon fell out of favour as the truly IBM PC-compatible clones took over.

I found this part of the process unusual:

In total my final font-header-file is about 22kB but it was a great relief to use AI for this dumb task. Google Gemini produced a nice font for my BIOS. On individual characters I had to fix some pixel-errors

Instead of simply searching for one of the numerous font-dumps that exist on the Internet, which will already be 100% correct for all of CP437? The CGA font would be a good match (and the one he ended up using looks like it), but there are plenty of other 8x8 fonts available.

> Instead of simply searching for one of the numerous font-dumps that exist on the Internet

On the other hand I enjoy reading about all the things people are recreating with LLMs, since it gives an idea of what's not just possible, but actually practical, in case I ever need something similar.

(This may be a short-lived preference though, if it gets to the point where just about anything within reason is practical.)

It's one thing to use an LLM to create something new, but to get it to regurgitate an imperfect version of something that already exists and is easily found, and then have to spend time fixing it, hardly seems like a good use.

Okay now you're someplace without internet but you have your 128GB workstation laptop with a 24GB GPU. Still waiting to work on a project that has assets "online if you just search"?

Or are you going to make a font by hand? From memory?

Not everything has to be done the way you think it needs to be done.

but you have your 128GB workstation laptop with a 24GB GPU

...which has a VBIOS you can extract the font from.

Just one? Even your standard Linux install will contain a couple dozen such fonts.

Most likely, the goal here was copyright laundering.

There’s a bunch of free character roms as well.

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