He wants to use a display mode with rectangular pixels. No matter what he does in software, that’s going to require specialized hardware. It’ll take a real CRT. No LCD ever made can change the shape of its own pixels.

More importantly, VGA text modes cannot be exactly simulated with standard VGA/VESA graphics modes. The people who wrote fake Blue Screen of Death joke programs for Windows NT discovered this years ago.

The article author is explicitly looking for 720 by 400, not 640 by 400, and is trying to obtain that using Linux mechanisms that select graphics modes and do not configure the hardware to be in an actual text mode. i.e. fbcon rather than vgacon.

A high enough resolution LCD can however emulate much larger CRT pixels.

And this even matches the way PC CRT monitors worked - each displayed "pixel" lights many different phosphors.

Untrue. Even cheap-ass imported HDMI monitors support aspect-corrected scaling from 720x400 (80x25 x 9x16) to their native resolutions, even if not all of them support fill to screen.

Most LCD displays will do hardware scaling when given a resolution lower than the native resolution.