Why are error messages, BIOS Screens etc. often blurry and don’t match the design of the OS?
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BIOS screens and error messages from hard crashes don’t look like the operating system because they aren’t part of the operating system. The OS just crashed, the error messages are provided by underlying systems that are still functioning or able to pick up the pieces.
They are often “blurry” because they are low resolution. Error messages are designed to be viewed in every situation so they don’t know what your screen is, what resolution it operates at, how to drive it, etc. Instead they default to the lowest, most basic resolution which is usable but not pretty. Too few pixels smeared across a bigger screen looks blurry.
BIOS are separate systems from the OS, so don’t really synchronize with them. The BIOS is super basic, hence the name, so tends to run on only the bare bones of a computer. You can think of the BIOS as just being there to start things *before* the OS takes over and does more complex stuff, like displaying nice graphics.
I guess an analogy would be winding up a clock. The winding mechanism is like the BIOS, it just starts the system of dozens of gears and weights and springs used to keep time. The winding mechanism isn’t the thing keeping time, it’s just a simple gear and lever, but without it the rest of the clock can’t even begin to function. You can even put a new clock on the winding mechanism and it will run the new clock, just as you can put a new OS on top of the BIOS. Sure, the winding/BIOS won’t match the new stuff, but who cares? If you see it it’ll only be once every long while, you’ll be using the clock face/OS most of the time.
When the PC is first started it comes pre-packaged with an initial set of instructions encoded on the hardware on how to display a signal to the monitor. This is very basic and isn’t OS specific.
After this, the cleaner display is possible when an event called bootstrapping occurs. This is where additional instructions driver information from DDLs (dynamic link libraries) are read into memory after the OS has booted, giving the better display.
App errors displayed after the OS loads may not look like it came from the app itself because apps are coded/interpreted through the base OS that it is being run on.
It is possible in some cases to make errors the app throws look more like it came from the app itself. But in the case where an app -causes- the OS problems, an appropriate OS error may be displayed such as ‘out of memory’.
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