These displays were the darlings of military contracts in the 1980s because of their extreme operating temperature gamut, and extremely fast switching speeds compared to LCD or even neon gas plasma, they can even be constructed on a transparent substrate for heads-up displays (and were used exactly for that purpose), a great display if you can get your hands on one, but second hand prices now are somewhat insane. The interface is a very simple 8 bit parallel interface.

I have definitely used cash machines with that screen back in the 1990's! Which typically ran OS/2 Warp in the background for stability and security. Each pixel is either on or off, so any application (or game!) that requires gradients of hue or saturation is going to look pretty rough, as you demonstrated. but it was not designed for that, just super-clear interfaces like a cash machine needed. Very interesting to see the raw digital output from that Trident card, of course normally with the single 15-pin connector it is analogue. The Feature connector is performing like a modern Display Port connector. I remember so many cards had that Feature connector, but never saw anything that used it, so this video was very interesting for that reason. PS, I am pretty sure, although it's a very old memory of mine, that Norton Sysinfo has a command line option to start it in mono mode, where it would actually look fine on your display. Anyway - thank you for the great video! You should try to watch one of your videos on this :)

I saw this on early 90's CNC machines running to this day. The interface is mostly lines and numbers so this display handles it perfectly fine

In my company we are still using that display for one of the devices we sell, since 95. Its a very high quality, high contrast, very wide angle display

I had an old amber VGA CRT back in the 90's and from memory I needed to include a "DEVICE=DISPLAY.SYS MONO" line (or something similar) in CONFIG.SYS to get colour text to display as "Black & Amber". Also, these older motherboards usually also have a jumper for MONO/COLOR although I've never seen it make any difference with a colour display attached.

This takes me way back to the first PC my dad bought, an IBM 8088 clone with an amber screen made by Mitsuba. Played many, many hours of chuck yeager's flight sim and learned to program BASIC on it.

These are developed and assembled in Finland. Lohja Elektroniikka sold this business to Planar System in 1990 and Planar sold the business back to other Finnish company Beneq in 2012. These are used in medical devices, industrial solutions, airplanes etc.

I'd say the display works as expected. AFAIK, the data on the VESA Feature Connector is just the raw 8-bit data that goes to the RAMDAC. That means it gets the palette index of the color that's to be shown. One problem is that the palette itself is *not* transmitted; without an additional ISA or PCI connection (to snoop VGA palette writes), a device on the FC can't know what any entry in the palette is supposed to look like. So what does the display do? It can't win, so it doesn't even try. It seems that it's just examining one bit of the palette index; from what I saw in the video, it's most probably bit 0 (LSB). In CGA/EGA-derived text modes, which use a fixed palette, this creates a relatively useful mapping: everything that has at least 50% blue to it will light up the pixel. The problem is, many DOS programs use a white-on-blue color scheme by default (Norton Commander, Norton SysInfo, Turbo Pascal etc.). The blue background will be rendered as lit, just as the white foreground. VGA graphics mode, however, it where it really becomes nasty: Almost every game redefines the VGA palette, so there's no fixed correspondence between the color that should be visible and the state of the TFEL. What you get is noise. Things to try: - Run DOS textmode apps in monochrome mode, if they have one. That should eliminate the white-on-white issue. - See if the significant palette bit can be changed somehow; maybe there's a jumper for that? Or re-wite the Feature Connector cable to route other bits to bit 0. The result should be that other palette entries are used to determine the TFEL state; games tend to have broader distinctions between colors in the upper bits, and more useful patterns may thus emerge. (For example, with Doom, bit 4 should select between amber and black based on the hue of the color that would be displayed on a color monitor.)

Windows 3.1 will work using the VGA drivers, but using the "Monochrome+dithering" themes from CGA or Hercules.

These displays were "unobtainium" in the LCD scene 20 years ago. Programs like LCDstudio were all the rage in the modding world and those EL panels were the absolute darlings.

EL displays were featured on GridCase rugged laptops used by the military and the NASA in the 80s to the 90s. These were made famous by the automated machine guns scene in the uncut version of Aliens!

I saw an article in a Danish Hifi-magazine during the 1990-1991 timeframe, that dealt with future display technologies and in here Finlux (Nokia Consumer Electronics Department) was quoted for developing Electro-Luminiscence displays. That is, working on developing better screens and with higher resolutions than their initial prototype that was showed I remember it, because this particular article formed the vision in me of one day having a large flat screen televisions in my living room. I fantasized that much, that I even made a drawing back in the day, 1991, of a large flat screen television standing on its feet on the living room floor. Angled upwards for better in-line viewing. And I think, only one year after reading about this (1992) we began to see 10.4" Thin Film Transistor, TFT Black Matrix displays in the most expensive portable computers at the time, Toshiba T3200 SXC and IBM Thinkpad 700C. TFT Black Matrix is a rock solid hardcore name. The beige portable IBM suitcase though, from the same timespan, came with a little flat screen plasma display instead, but that was also amber. So with these technologies penetrating the market at that time, it was within reason to presume that sooner or later we would see this technology entering our homes. And boy...did it ever. It sure turned out to be a tsunami quite frankly. To end the story. We bought a 50" Panasonic Plasma G10 television in 2009 and it's still showing a spectacular picture more than 13 years after the purchase and I get awestucked almost every time I watch a Bluray through this display. It's capable of turning itself into an invisible piece of transparent glass, when watching good source material. Well. Cheerioh, ol' chump. Have yourself an excellent January. My best to the Misses.

Thank you. Very interesting video. It's cool to discover something new! Keep informing us about those technologies that did not become mainstream!

Love seeing you back and making amazing videos for us again! Just want to say how much I love your work, and loved hearing you laugh at the beginning of the video, really good to hear you laughing! Take care buddy! And can’t wait to watch what you are about to share with us!

Very cool! Beautiful display and literally the first time I've ever seen those old graphics cards pins used.

Instead of CGA, you should probably go with Hercules or other monochrome modes. Of course newer DOS games didn't have support for those, but some older ones, could work. It could also work under Windows 3.x - it had a monochrome modes which would make it look more like old Macs (which were also just 2 colors, no greyscale).

Sokoban on an amber display, that's how I played a game for the first time ever! Amber displays have a special place in my heart =]. Amazing video as always, it's incredible the kind of equipment you manage to find out there!

The Apollo DSKY display was also Electroluminescent, 250V at 800Hz so this is an old technology 😀

Never heard about this technology and how it worked, despite having seen some indeed on vintage industrial equipment (computer controlled lathes). I always thought these were plasma things like the DMD displays on pinball machines. It's also the display GLaDOS uses as a backup terminal and karaoke display ;)

If I ever win the lottery, I'll be sure to pick one of these up. They're so interesting, just unfortunately so expensive : P

I love how the graphs on the second page of system info looks like and apple comparison chart now

Your voice is nice man. Been watching for maybe 6 months and I love your channel. Thanks for the content.

Looks similar to plasma from T2100 Toshiba "notebook". Only colour is slightly different.

Today , after 35 years , I understand what vga card connectors were for . I was told it was an input connector for expansions.

Gotta love amber displays! In text mode this thing looks way cool, definitely neat display tech!

With those specs sounds quite expensive. That response and brightness and operating range, I see many comments about industrial and military applications. Cool find!

In the nineties I had an XT PC with amber monochrome crt, so I liked the color of this screen a lot, I think much easier on the eyes then green on black as I see usually. It remembers me of the amber low pressure sodium lamps that lit our highways. Sadly we threw away that old XT as back then we thought of it as old garbage. I regret that...

I've never heard of this screen technology! Thank you for sharing!

Amber screens were always my favorite ones. SO calming and easy on the eyes.

I've got a small luggable PC (like a clone Compaq Portable III) which has a gas plasma display in it. Connects to the VGA feature connector like your display. It displays monochrome shades of amber perfectly in 16 colour modes, but in 256 colour modes it acts like the colour palette settings aren't working, and you get very weird effects. Still, despite all this, it's a fun display to try out, and certainly has similarities to your display!

Gorgeous looking screen, I can see this working great for monitoring my servers.

Doom: The Matrix has you, Neo! :-D

Beneq is the company who makes those displays and machines that can make those displays, ALD (atomic layer deposition) machines and Lumineq is trademark for displays. I think they try to make color version of it maybe they already have but at least I remember once read article about future of this technology.

Very specialist and quite interesting!

IIRC, weren't Hercules graphics straight black and white? That might be playable here. Really cool display though. Good catch by your friend. 👍

the amber color does indeed have charm was my favorite color for pipboy screen in fallout

Way back in the old days AMX used to have a touch panel that used TFEL as its display.

I love amber screens and that one looks really nice!

4:28 Another type of device that used the VGA feature connector were TV tuner cards, that let you watch live TV on your computer.

Added to my wanted list 😁

It's a shame that it's (probably) expensive and it doesn't do any sort of grayscale. It'd make an awesome replacement for an Amstrad PPC's LCD screen.

I kind of like how the Duke3D atomic intro looks like. 🙂

Dithering can be used to simulate more shades. Not sure if it can be done on the fly fast enough to play games, but displaying dithered 1bit pictures would be possible.

Me personally I would use that as a sensor monitor pacifically for monitoring my temperature CPU fan speed and such

when i was a kid i had a laptop with a display a bit like this i think, it was also amber. not tfel but some kind of electroluminescent thing. it was one of those very wide, short displays.

YES new episode!

I almost managed to get a hold of a Planar TTL electroluminescent display at a local computer store about twenty years ago. It could be used with any standard monochrome graphics card. It was mounted to an old medical computer cart and it actually folded up like a laptop computer. Someone ended up beating me to it before I went back to buy it. I have yet to see another, either online or in person.

These displays are truly made for text only. However there are both text adventures you could run on it & you’ve forgotten text mode games. Rogue anyone? Fun video thanks, Peter. @CPU Galaxy

Prince of Persia would've looked lovely in Hercules mode, I think.

Nice! This looks like it might be the same display on our Nikon litho steppers.

Only knew simple EL displays from alarm clocks, watches and the AGCs DSKY. Never seen one used on DOS machine. In fact I never seen an mono display on an PC either. Very interesting. Thank you for sharing this great content.

I have a feeling this would have been fitted to the 1970=80 Nasa space craft, if they were still going to the Moon, next gen DSKY

Few toughts: I had an amber Plasma display on my Toshiba 286 portable; it was CGA but the colors were displayed as patterns, it was infact a 1 bit color depth dispay It seems to be somewhat displaying the image like a Hercules mono but on VGA standard. I used Win 3.0 with Hercules and was nice, also many game that I played on my 286 looked good enough on that plasma amber display. Dos programs usually had a switch for being used on 1 bit displays like plasma CGA or LCD VGA. Find it ("/?" is your friend). For example HELP /B uses a monochrome monitor on a VGA card. There was a disply driver for dos (display.sys) that helped when using a VGA mono monitor. Also in BIOS could select MONO as video output but this setting originally was intended for Hercules mono or MDA (it sets video memory to b000 if I remember right but some VGA do not luke that) so it may give errors if used with a VGA adapter. Now I really want one for my 386 but I saw the prices... I´ll pass for now.

I've seen these displays before and I never knew what the hell they were called and I never was able to ever find them again on the Internet thanks for making this video this is really cool I hope you can find the one with the extra layer of color on it I'd love to see that these are really cool thanks for upload me this I'm going to find one of these for myself one day it just really cool

That's how the display on the Apollo DSKY would look like if it was made in the '80s... Lovely one :) And I hella remember Prince of Persia and Sokoban on an amber monochrome display, back when I was a kid in the early '90s and played games on a 80286 PC XT. A real deal trip down the memory lane.

looks like it would be a really nice terminal display for minicomputers such as the PDP-11

Gosh, if I can find which one it was I'll post the name. There's an episode of Computer Chronicles from the early 1980s that covered CES. One of the items on display was a "two page" _plasma_ amber flat screen. It was absolutely gorgeous. And huge. Would be awesome to play with one of those.

I wonder how this would look with the Hercules Graphics Card's B&W mode.

I had a display with a blue white EL backlight, but it was totally flat, EL itself was well past its best, and the display itself was a 320x200 MDA panel with plain TN display, and as slow as molasses, plus a viewing angle of around 10 degrees, only viewable in near darkness. Another was a Panasonic, similar to that TEFL display, and also it was well burnt, and also very much mono only, with barely any contrast range.

I love Amber Displays. I want one of theses display modules.. Maybe I should look out for one.

Going from my old DOS days. you need to configure the video card to output in grey scale to the display. I agree with the other's comments that this was for either point of sale or ATM system.

I know I've dealt with many gas pumps and ATMs with full color displays that I wish used something like this instead--though e-ink would probably make sense for monocolor screens now.

Would it work with Hercules monochrome graphics card? Would it not be a perfect match for this display? Prince, Prehistorik, North & South all support Hercules Graphics.

I think this would be great for 70s/early 80s arcade games

Everything is placed in place now 🤣 I love you

This kinda panel in color is the dream for retro pcs

The CGA colors looks better on this amber monitor than on dedicated CGA. ;)

I would love to have one of these for writing, running a simple DOS editor or word processor on. Maybe even build a custom "luggable" around one. But they are quite costly, unfortunately.

I'de love one of these. Did you check contrast with darkened plastic? Or may be some other sort of filter.

Wow - i’ve got a sharp pc-7100 xt luggable from 1986 that has an EL display but it is absolutely useless unless the light is completely off. I ran pop on it too lol. This TFEL is a massive leap forward in detail, speed and clarity.

Old Mac OSs are in MONO, try hooking it up to an old mac in BW mode, Should work fine if you can adapt the video connector. Keep making great videos

It has a CRT look to it. I would love to see the better version of this tech.

I love that "a little bit more than 179 degree viewing angle" "What do you mean? You can't see the display from behind it? unacceptable" lol

so near yet so far lol. Although I still would have been impressed by the form factor and the clarity back in the day.

If you made a little bracket to mount the display to the card it would be a great POST diag screen. I personally would love to build a little folding textmode terminal with it. I wonder if it has a grayscale mode, or if it has the ability to do bright/dim pixels.This would be fun to get working with a 1bit mac too

i sugest using high framerate camera to see how the pixels are refreshing this screen would work much better with hercules mono and prince of persia have hercules mode

I'd love one for reading e-books and interface digital audio in a home made tablet. That's all I want my tablet to do. Maybe power it with a pi4 iI have lying around with some sort of instant boot linux os. So cool, I love it.

This is a cyberpunk dream display. I need it.

I have one of these in a Sony console and have plans for a future video getting it running.

We need Bad Apple on this!

This screen is from a UA 571-C Remote Sentry Weapon System visual display unit! 😉

I would love to see it work on an early Macintosh. They also had 1 bit color, including games.

This would've been so nice to have back in 83 lol

Are there any cards with Hercules emulation that can hook in to it? Also fastdoom might support a vga monochrome high res dithered mode.

I used Hercules MDA on a amber screen a lot, but it had a higher resolution and also bright mode (however still not a game platform)

EL screens have been around a while. I have an industrial touchscreen 386sx machine that unfortunately does not work right now that has one. I believe it had 4 amber scales available? I forget the name of the vendor.

richtig super geil sieht es aus 😆👌

This video leads me to a transcendental question, is there a version of Doom for Hercules video modes? I remember games like Outrun or Golden ax with their amber hatched graphics...

Would have been nice to see how they're generating that mono image. Is it just taking one of the 3 channels? I think this is the first time I've ever seen anything that connects to that VGA Feature connector.

screen is nice and sharp, spy hunter would look good

The perfect display for a PipBoy

Hilarious, brilliant 👍👍👍

Where did you get this display from? It looks amazing!!! I wonder if they ever came in green too

This display reminds me of a GRiD displays, probably because of the color.

9:42 You might want to try Hercules 2 color mode in stead of CGA 4 color.

Looks similar to what the Grid 110x "Laptop" portables used, where they the first users?

I bet if there was a way to input pure mono color to it or configure the video card for it somehow that amber screen is very nice and sharp and beautiful color to look at

Unimaginable nowadays, once upon a time normal..

Never heard of such kind of displays before. Though some DOS tools and softwares can display mono. But Doom hahahah. Looks similar to the version they had let run in a task manager on like 800 threads or so - which also displays like a mono matrix but with shades at least haha.

Given that this can only display mono on/off… made me think of MDA screens. Have you tried a game in Hercules graphics mode?