Comment by LexiMax

Only tangentially related, but the title reminds me of hack you could do on old DOS machines to get access to a 160x100 16-color display mode on a CGA graphics adapter.

The display mode is actually a hacked up 80x25 text mode. So in that specific narrow case, you have a display mode where text characters very much function as pixels.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter

- https://github.com/drwonky/cgax16demo