Comment by lproven

There were also software-defined modes. A very handy tool for awful early-1990s LCDs was Laptop Ultravision:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/compute///issue138/124_Laptop...

It ran the DOS text screen in VGA graphics mode, with soft-loaded fonts, but this also permitted all kinds of extra modes -- iff your DOS apps supported them. Some just read the screen dimensions and worked, some didn't.