Corrupted fonts in text mode windows

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Last update: 25th February, 1996

Symptoms

Ref: OS/2 Warp APARs PJ18391, PJ18399, PJ19050

If you are running Warp and using an S3 80x or 864 chipset display adapter, you may experience an odd font-related problem if you have tried to use alternate mouse pointer sets.

The problem appears as missing (blanked) or corrupted characters. The characters affected will generally be constant in a given context, but will vary from font to font. Opening the System Editor (E.EXE) and selecting various fonts will generally demonstrate the problem if it is present.

For example, if the S and L characters were affected for a given font, the following line:

  LIBPATH=.;D:\OS2\DLL;D:\OS2\MDOS;D:\;D:\OS2\APPS\DLL;D:\MMOS2\DLL;

might appear as

   IBPATH=.;D:\O 2\D  ;D:\O 2\MDO ;D:\;D:\OS \APP \D  ;D:\MMO 2\D  ;

Hardware

Various S3 Video Cards
Various Western Digital Cards
IBM 8514/A

Procedure

The workaround is simply to revert the mouse pointer set back to its default. Open the Mouse object in the System Setup folder, select the Pointers tab, and click on the Default button. You lose your pretty pointer set, but gain in readability (;-).

A new display driver for the S3 864-based adapters has been released which reportedly fixes this problem. S3 80x-based adapters (e.g. the Diamond Stealth24) will have to use the workaround until a new driver is shipped.

Notes

This problem has also been reported on IBM 8514/A and Western Digital 90C24 adapters.

This workaround seems to have fixed the one system I knew of that was seeing this problem. Hope it helps others as well.

Frank McKenney