🚀 go-pugleaf

This may have been asked before on the net, so if you consider it a dumb
question, my abject apologies :-).

For a program (written in C) that operates on the hercules graphics card in
graphics mode, I need the extended ASCII-character set (characters from
decimal 128 to 255) to display the german 'Umlaute'.
Being lazy but inventive :-), I use the ASCII charactertable in the ROM to
display text in graphics mode; however, this only giv%s me the 'normal'
letters. Now GRAFTABL.COM provides this extended character set, but I
need to ascertain if it has been loaded in my program prior to switching into
graphics mode. If anybody on the net has ideas on how to do this, I would be
grateful for any hints you might be able to give. Just checking if the int 1fh
vector points to 0000:0000 does not seem to work reliably on all machines.

Failing that, how do I load GRAFTABL per default from inside my program? As
GRAFTABL makes itself memory resident, a
  spawnlp("graftabl.com","graftabl.com",NULL);
or
  system("graftabl");
works, but plays havoc with the memory structure; after terminating my
program, a 2k block of memory stays allocated in the middle of
RAM and crashes the system soon afterwards.

Again, any hints on how to do this would be appreciated.
I'm running DOS3.3 on an AT-clone, if it matters.

Thanks in advance, Martin
 ...!uunet!unido!rmi!dg5kx!dg5kx                      "MSDOS? Just say NO!"
 ...!uunet!unido!rmi!marvin