BIOS how many colors can it display?

[jeremy23_2002]

I was wondering how many colors the BIOS screen can display? 16 colors? 256 colors? and what limits the BIOS to being able to display so small amount of colors?

For the eaxmple the Energy Star symbol on my phoenix bios. It has very few colors.

[Jumby]

The BIOS screen doesn't display any colors but standard green. There is no reason for it to have any colors. It's only showing text.

[mjc]

Not quite true, Jumby, the Energy Star logo is part of the BIOS and on many off the shelf machines the company logo is more than two colors,also frequntly they display the screens in a color other than green (HP uses blue)....I think, but can't quite pin it down that it is 16 color.

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[rond36]

What BIOS screen are we talking about? The POST screen or the set up screens? My POST screen display is in 4 colors black with white text and a red white and blue Soyo logo the Soyo logo can be changed to a yellow energy star logo in BIOS set up.

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[Jumby]

I guess I meant that the "BIOS screen" (the letters) are only in one color, whether it's blue, or green or whatever. Of course I was trying to remember really, without re-booting and pressing "delete" to check. If that's the bios screen he's asking about.

[mjc]

rond36, all of that is part of the same program...the enrgystar/soyo logo, the individual screens, etc...

Ok found a little info this is for AMI BIOs:

132 pixels wide, up to 480 pixels long
4 Bit colour (16-colours)
Standard PCX file! No need to convert them to some proprietary format!

That is the logo info, I believe that Award and Phoenix both use 16 colors also but the size and pic format are different.

PS: Info on Award.... For a fullscreen bitmap logo you start with a BMP file of 640x464 pixels and 4 bit colour depth. Again this is converted by a tool and stored in a BIOS file using cbrom with option /logo.


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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.


[This message has been edited by mjc (edited 04-11-2002).]

[jeremy23_2002]

I figured it was 16 colors. I believe the BIOS shows so little colors becuase ROM which the BIOS is stored on was used in the first PC's and is still used to this day. ROM is relatively small in size usually about 2Mb and no larger.

Also I believe the energy star logo and any other BIOS/POST level graphics are stored on the actuall ROM itself so it is a space saving issue. Larger,higher resolution graphics display alot of colors at a much sharper level but also take up considerable amount of space (Something the ROM has very little of) The ROM's main job is to store the the CMOS setup and not pretty graphics so I think that's why we are still stuck with 4 bit color (16 colors) also if anymore colors were displayed, say 256 colors I believe you'd have to have the Graphic Display drivers loaded before the OS could load, is that right? I'm just shooting in the dark on this one.
I think the Videocard uses some very generic and basic drivers at boot up rather than the complex drivers that are loaded once you are actually inside the OS eviorment. Please correct me if im wrong guys.

[saphalline]

Originally posted by jeremy23_2002:
I think the Videocard uses some very generic and basic drivers at boot up rather than the complex drivers that are loaded once you are actually inside the OS eviorment.

I believe you're right on that, when my comp boots up, my vid card actually displays its info first (and a very tiny pic) including a vid RAM count. Then my POST info shows, along with the BIOS pic. My mom's does the same thing. Of course, I've never messed with the boot process of either one, default boot options off the mobo.

[mjc]

Yep, the video card contains a ROM chip and basic generic video drivers....

And you would be surprised exactly how much info you can fit into 2MB, the original ROM chips were much smaller, on the order of 128KB to 256KB and later grew to 512KB...all the start up nfo had to be contain in that small amount of memory. The 2MB of today's chips do not contain 2MB of BIOS information. The BIOS program on most computers is still less than 512KB...take a look at the .ROM file in a BIOS flash....typically less than 500K!

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mjc
Links list:Computer Links (http://www.dreamwater.org/tech/mjc/index.htm)

Celts are the men that heaven made mad, For all their battles are merry and their songs are all sad.

[randyrhoads1981]

PS: Info on Award.... For a fullscreen bitmap logo you start with a BMP file of 640x464 pixels and 4 bit colour depth. Again this is converted by a tool and stored in a BIOS file using cbrom with option /logo.

Does someone make a program that will let you edit or add logo screens to a update flash before its used to flash the bios?

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[rond36]

Here are some how-to guides.
Virtual Hideout Moding your BIOS Logo part 1 (http://www.virtual-hideout.net/guides/bios_logo_mods/index.shtml)
Virtual Hideout Moding your BIOS Logo part 2 (http://www.virtual-hideout.net/guides/bios_logo_mods_part2/index.shtml)

------------------
How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q255867)
WindowsBBS.com (http://www.WindowsBBS.com/index.php?referrerid=115) Windows Help Forum Is back online, check it out. If you can't find it here you might find it there!