Here is an attempt at answering some questions in advance.
Question: Question: Does this TEX know virtual fonts?
Answer: No, TEX itself has no knowledge of virtual fonts. It only reads the information for the font from the tfm-file (TEX Font Metric) belonging to the font, this exists for ``normal'', as well as for virtual fonts.
Question: I cannot find tex?!?
Answer: tex is |virtex| with a format (e.g. plainTEX or LaTEX) to be loaded.
Question: What is a preloaded format?
Answer: On some operating systems, you can stop |virtex| after it has loaded the format file and create a so-called core file. From this core file, and the executable file |virtex| you can create a further executable file, in which the format file has already been loaded. The advantage, a mostly faster loading of |virtex| and formatfile, is offset by the disadvantage of the space requirements of the new executable file, which is a great deal larger as that of |virtex| only.
Question: I get the following error message, when loading the format file (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied).
Answer: All other filetypes (|tfm|, |dvi|, |pk|, …) are fully exchangeable between different implementations – on different computers as well – The format file takes a special position in that, as it should be loadable at the greatest speed possible, and represents an image of the internal TEXarrays. Therefore it cannot be exchanged that easily. Workaround: you create a new format file with |initex|.