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It's easy to do things like that when you control the hardware end-to-end. Text mode makes perfect sense for BIOS that has to deal with so many different kinds of hardware, especially when you remember just how varied a mess graphics hardware has been on PCs well into late 90s.

Windows itself would generally assume the lowest supported hardware, so e.g. for Win95 the boot screen used VGA graphics mode (since the minimum requirement for Win95 UI itself was the VGA 640x480 16-color mode). BIOS had to assume less since it might have to find itself dealing with something much more ancient.






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