This clone CGA/MDA card has a couple of surprising hidden features

Рет қаралды 41,156

3 ай бұрын

You might look at this 8-bit ISA card and just think it's another run of the mill CGA/MDA clone card, but it turns out there are some very cool hidden features this card has.
FCC ID: BNX84HB0-2323
-- Video Links
Adrian's Digital Basement Merch store:
my-store-c82bd2-2.creator-spr...
Support the channel on Patreon:
/ adriansdigitalbasement
Adrian's Digital Basement (Main Channel)
/ @adriansdigitalbasement
My GitHub repository:
github.com/misterblack1?tab=r...
-- Tools
Deoxit D5:
amzn.to/2VvOKy1
store.caig.com/s.nl/it.A/id.16...
O-Ring Pick Set: (I use these to lift chips off boards)
amzn.to/3a9x54J
Elenco Electronics LP-560 Logic Probe:
amzn.to/2VrT5lW
Hakko FR301 Desoldering Iron:
amzn.to/2ye6xC0
Rigol DS1054Z Four Channel Oscilloscope:
www.rigolna.com/products/digi...
Head Worn Magnifying Goggles / Dual Lens Flip-In Head Magnifier:
amzn.to/3adRbuy
TL866II Plus Chip Tester and EPROM programmer: (The MiniPro)
amzn.to/2wG4tlP
www.aliexpress.com/item/33000...
TS100 Soldering Iron:
amzn.to/2K36dJ5
www.ebay.com/itm/TS100-65W-MI...
EEVBlog 121GW Multimeter:
www.eevblog.com/product/121gw/
DSLogic Basic Logic Analyzer:
amzn.to/2RDSDQw
www.ebay.com/itm/USB-Logic-DS...
Magnetic Screw Holder:
amzn.to/3b8LOhG
www.harborfreight.com/4-inch-...
Universal ZIP sockets: (clones, used on my ZIF-64 test machine)
www.ebay.com/itm/14-16-18-20-...
RetroTink 2X Upconverter: (to hook up something like a C64 to HDMI)
www.retrotink.com/
Plato (Clone) Side Cutters: (order five)
www.ebay.com/itm/1-2-5-10PCS-...
Heat Sinks:
www.aliexpress.com/item/32537...
Little squeezy bottles: (available elsewhere too)
amzn.to/3b8LOOI
--- Instructional videos
My video on damage-free chip removal:
• How to remove chips wi...
--- Music
Intro music and other tracks by:
Nathan Divino
@itsnathandivino

Пікірлер: 167

@kronos5385 3 ай бұрын

As someone who worked at IBM during the development of the 5150 PC I can verify that they deliberately crippled certain functions because they didn't want to compete with their more expensive mid-range products (System 32, 36, AS400, etc). Their PC could have been so much better with very little cost to the company or consumer. The politics between the different divisions was cutthroat.

@volvo09 3 ай бұрын

Sadly that is not uncommon at all... Deliberately take away features a product could do, just to push people who don't shop off brand up to a higher tier.

@lancegentle6430 3 ай бұрын

Didn't REALLY work professionally around in IBMs heyday, but, worked in their services off-shoot (TSS - Technology Services Solution) branch. Worked out of the, then, IBM building in Baltimore, MD. Was IBM badged. Mainly replaced terminal-based products.

@stonent 3 ай бұрын

I remember reading that is why the 5170 was locked out of higher speeds in the bios because the performance was too good for the price point. So of course other clone companies took advantage of this and made 10/12/16/20 MHz systems.

@fallous 3 ай бұрын

V-Tech had a history of having weird modes, even in the Laser 128. Back in the 80s I had a Laser 128 and managed to get it to display a double-hires screen that was double-stacked vertically, then made a paint program for it.

@jordanhazen7761 3 ай бұрын

Interesting! Was this an interlaced mode, like an Amiga? Or was the horizontal sweep rate actually higher, needing a multisync monitor to display? I used to have one of those (128EX/2), and appreciated its RGBI output (even if colors weren't especially faithful to Apple's) but never knew about any special video modes

@fallous 3 ай бұрын

@@jordanhazen7761 It displayed on RF out to a normal NTSC television. Definitely interlaced.

@vwestlife 3 ай бұрын

The grayscale 320x200 option in Planet X3 is working correctly. On a composite monitor it disables the color burst, giving artifact-free grayscale video, but on an RGB monitor it still shows up in color, with the magenta color replaced by red.

@kilianhekhuis 3 ай бұрын

Afaik on a monochrome monitor, red looks better than magenta as a grey scale gradient.

@vwestlife 3 ай бұрын

@@kilianhekhuisYes, plus some games purposely use the "grayscale" mode to get a better-looking RGB color palette than the standard white/cyan/magenta.

@kilianhekhuis 3 ай бұрын

@@vwestlife Indeed, less of an eye sore than magenta 😄

@kilianhekhuis 3 ай бұрын

To add to that, did some calculations, and red is about 30% grey, while magenta is 44%. Cyan is 73% (and obviously black is 0% and white is 100%). So with cyan, you have 44-29-27% difference, so all non-blacks are almost all in the upper half, while with red, you have 30-43-27, which is a better spread of greys (though still not evenly).

@eformance 3 ай бұрын

I strongly suspect this "color MDA" mode is an artifact of Compaq CGA compatibility. Compaq did some funky stuff with their early portables, they had a grayscale monochrome monitor that displayed the 9x14 character set with multiple shades of gray for text mode, but they also supported CGA graphics mode in multiple shades of gray. This "mono+CGA" capability would have been necessary for those grayscale CRT displays to output in those modes.

@skilletpan5674 3 ай бұрын

I vagely remember a resolution difference for some games? I think elite or similar games from that period (street rod 1/2 for example) had a slightly different picture/resolution/colors when you used MDA mode vs VGA or EGA. It was an a kind of weird attempt to do EGA/VGA but keeping the CGA name. If i remember it had a 64 or 256 color mode.

@HTMLEXP 3 ай бұрын

In the 1980s, 'colour MDA', high resolution colour text mode would have been useful for productivity and business software.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Indeed it's so much easier on the eyes than CGA text ...

@root42 3 ай бұрын

I think Eric of TubeTime changed one of his MDA cards to show color. So it definitely is possible!

@ironhead2008 3 ай бұрын

Yeah, it looks almost VGA text mode quality

@Roxor128 3 ай бұрын

@@ironhead2008 For good reason: the fonts are very similar in size. 9*14 for MDA and 9*16 for VGA. The ninth column in both being via selectively duplicating the last one, depending on the character.

@anthonyblacker8471 3 ай бұрын

Adrian it's nice now that you're doing this full time so you can take the extra time to look at things like this and make a video for us. Thank you!

@tirsek 3 ай бұрын

The Plantronics mode was awesome. Growing up, a friend of mine had an Amstrad PC1512 with CGA graphics and it also had this elusive 640x200x16 colors graphics mode. I don't remember a lot of software being able to take advantage of it, aside from the GEM Desktop it shipped with, but boy was it awesome when something did.

@blinkinglightsandsmokingcaps 3 ай бұрын

There was a space strategy game entitled Milennium 2.2 that supported the PC1512's advanced colour mode. I'm not sure if this was the standard release of the game, or a special edition.

@senilyDeluxe 3 ай бұрын

I've seen some newschool demo/homebrewing stuff supporting it - showing off photos in 640x200x16 on this machine at a retrocomputing event.

@terrylutfi8888 3 ай бұрын

Apparently this card also came with Vtech Laser XT/3 machine, if you look up XT/3 manual it shows the card footprint, port and has a few pages describing its modes, configuration and basic jumper settings.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Any mention of the Plantronics compatible mode in that manual?

@terrylutfi8888 3 ай бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 unfortunately nothing about Plantronics, it only explains one jumper setting for card BIOS, quote from manual: "If you install the Monochrome Graphics/Color Graphics Card in a non-Laser computer, or the Monochrome Graphics/Color Graphics Card coexists with another graphics card (e.g. EGA, CGA or MDA). You may have to disable the Laser BIOS built in to the graphics card. When you disable the built-in BIOS, you will need to set the DIP switches inside the non-Laser computer to match the MDA/CGA slide switch on the card's faceplate. "

@nurmr 3 ай бұрын

Specifically when JP2 is in the upper position (pins 2&3) the Laser BIOS is disabled.

@rallyscoot 3 ай бұрын

I have one myself to.

@pelgervampireduck 3 ай бұрын

Wow. Color in Hercules mode. Now I've seen everything. This is insane!. It's like if somebody told me "CGA can do 640x480 at 256 colors", I thought "hercules can't do color" was like a natural law of the universe hahaha.

@damouze 3 ай бұрын

I was kind of expecting the plantronics mode, given the 64kb of RAM and the fact that it's from VTech, the company behind the Laser brand of computers. However, the color MDA support was a complete surprise!

@joshhiner729 3 ай бұрын

I was super excited to watch this video and it did not disappoint. I love these interesting topics most others wouldnt cover. Thank you for the detailed info and history. The deep dives are rare and refreshing.

@Nerd3927 3 ай бұрын

I would have been so happy with that card back in the day! So Cool!

@lancegentle6430 3 ай бұрын

Had REALLY nice MultiSYNC monitors back in the day. NEC and BNC Mitsubishi monitors. Stupid young me didn't keep them around.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

They are the rarest things now. It seems hardly any of those old expensive monitors were saved.

@senilyDeluxe 3 ай бұрын

Reminds me of myself. I had three monitors (2x 14 inch, 1x 16 inch) that could do TTL RGBi down to 15kHz and analog SVGA up to (38kHz? 1024x768 interlaced). And I threw them away even though they worked. Right now I have one Matsushita I think Adrian had featured years ago, but his had composite additional to TTL RGBi and analog SVGA, mine doesn't. Btw. there are way more early SVGA monitors that support 15kHz than you'd think. Most of these monitors, you'd take a look at, they have just a fixed VGA cable, you plug them in and test them, they can display 1024x768 with no problems, you turn them on with no signal at all and they don't emit any whine (your dog may beg to differ), so you wouldn't expect them to sync 15kHz... yet some do. (they just don't do TTL, so you'd have to make an adapter, good luck with the 64 colors) (although then again only the 16 inch monitor was nice. The others were beat up, one was used by a dentist, run all day every day and the CRT was well beyond worn out - and I think the 16 inch one day just stopped working or something like that. Still, I could kick myself for throwing these out - and that was around 2010 and I wasn't really young anymore, like 25).

@SenileOtaku 3 ай бұрын

My NEC Multisync monitor eventually went bad. Probably around the mid-1990s. So that one is LONG gone.

@elfenmagix8173 3 ай бұрын

Motorola did make the 6845 as a CRT Controller adaptor, and many clones of it are floating about; but the most famous of clones out there was MOS 6545 (Used on some PETs and other systems. Motorola's mistake with the chip was giving it so many address lines (18; 13 main addressees and 5 reversed)that it is capable of a lot more that just MDA or CGA. In fact there are many EGA Cards that use it and even some low end VGA Cards that use it as well. So that chip is capable of a lot more than just running CGA/MDA; it depends on how much RAM is on board and how much it can address. The rest is on how it is programmed. I'm just speculating here, but if that chip can do a list process for its display, like the Atari's Antic Chip does, then it is programmable to what ever the user wants it to be and not just simple graphics. I do remember seeing animation on various systems (Commodore, Atari, Coc, et al...) where the image remained stationary but the animation was done by changing the color pallet around. One such animation was of a waterfall, where the water looked like it was falling but it was not, but the color pallet being rotated about made it seem like the water was falling. Also, with that much RAM under CGA and MDA Modes, one can flip memory pages about, also adding to animation capabilities. 640X400 resolution only requires about 32K of RAM;; hile 320X200 only requires 8K.With 64K for the 6845 to handle, 64K; in short, you can do a lot with it; only the new Demo Programmers of today are finding out how much one can do with this chip. if using all 18 addressing bits, that is about 4MB of RAM that little video processor can acass. Imagine what you can do with that.

@drussell_ 12 күн бұрын

I have several of those exact cards. They're nicely universal.

@GYTCommnts 3 ай бұрын

Man, I love your videos Adrian! 💪

@kilianhekhuis 3 ай бұрын

I have an ATi Small Wonder CGA/Hercules gfx card that also supports Plantronics mode, no jumpers needed 🙂. Plantronics mode doesn't need 64KiB btw, just 32 (double the CGA memory). It has an extra "bit" plane, that actually holds two bits per pixel: the blue and intensity bits (the normal CGA memory still has the red and green bits).

@user-nd8zh3ir7v 3 ай бұрын

mda color, very cool! great vid as always

@atv22314 3 ай бұрын

That's pretty neat. I enjoyed the video. Thanks

@Soup_it 3 ай бұрын

Thanks Adrian! Cool gpu!

@serenity1378 3 ай бұрын

"That static we're seeing" man my eyes must be bad because I am seeing, zero static. (I know my eyes are bad tbf)

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Heh! It was only mild interference in the picture, easy to miss.

@gregmark1688 2 ай бұрын

Damn, I sure wish we had known about some of this stuff back then! Imagine what tricks we don't even know that you can do with a stock EGA!

@tw11tube 3 ай бұрын

@29:55 49Hz instead of 50 Hz is because this card uses the Hercules pixel clock of 16.000 MHz (a very common crystal) instead of the MDA pixel clock at 16.257 MHz (an oddball freuquency). I have a EIZO 9050 multisync monitor, and it will happily display "color MDA". It does not even support MDA-pinout input on its 9-pin input jack, but I built an adapter cable that routes "video" to "green", so I can get a "green-on-black" image if I so desire. I also can use a front-panal control to convert the RGB input into grayscale or amber-scale, so I get MDA at amber, green or white, depending on the switch setting. That monitor does not have the MDA-like medium-persistence (that's the correct technical term, actual long-persistence phosphor is used on radar screens) phosphor, so looking at MDA frequency pictures with a bright background is quite tiresome. And that's my hypothesis why we never got "color MDA": You just had no color monitors that were flicker-free at 50Hz, and there is no point in having a video card generate a signal that can not be sensibly displayed by any available monitor.

@senilyDeluxe 3 ай бұрын

Europe / PAL countries have 50Hz color TVs with bearable flicker... I wouldn't wanna use one of these for serious work 8hrs a day... but yeah, importing monitors en masse from Europe for a feature rarely anyone is gonna use... those monitors would have been crazy expensive... (btw. I just read an article about SSTV and the early space program, chemists/engineers back then could tune the persistence of phosphor to pretty much any refresh rate you like, even one frame per minute!)

@mrnmrn1 2 ай бұрын

@@senilyDeluxe The 50Hz TV signal is bearable because it is interlaced! The color MDA signal would be a lot worse on CRT because it is non-interlaced. I used my 21" CRT monitor at 47Hz interlaced mode for a couple of years because my video card did not recognise it and blocked any refresh rates above 60Hz. 47Hz interlaced was a lot less tiresome to my eyes then 60Hz progressive. Although it looked horrible and made small text hard to read.

@senilyDeluxe 2 ай бұрын

@@mrnmrn1 You're absolutely right! Also, same here (although there was a trend in the early 00s where websites had backgrounds with vertically alternating lines which flickered like crazy in interlaced mode). Trick: Delete the monitor from the device manager, then it (at least Windows 98) lets you select all the modes the video card has to offer. Downside: This slowly killed my 17 inch MAG Innovision monitor which had an awesome picture even at 1600x1200, which it shouldn't have been able to display. The frequency was too high for the deflection circuit, slowly killing the driver transistors (probably). Interlaced mode is how early TV killed two birds with one stone - the bandwidth of the video signal was designed around the limits of the technology, so they had to find a sweet spot in between HiRes but flickery and Doesn't Flicker but LowRes. Interlacing masked the flicker some and doubled the resolution at the same time!

@mrnmrn1 2 ай бұрын

@@senilyDeluxe I tried many tricks, but that card (Radeon 9600 128MB AGP) refused to send anything to that monitor other than 47Hz interlaced and 60Hz progressive. It showed selectable refresh rates up to 180Hz but whatever I selected it was 60Hz in reality. It is a Samtron 21" CRT from about 2002, I used it between ~2009/2010 - 2011/2012, with WinXP. Turned out the problem was my VGA cable which was missing a wire so the graphic card was unable to identify the monitor, and that particular card with that particular driver somehow locked out every other refresh rates because of it, and I couldn't override it.

@senilyDeluxe 2 ай бұрын

@@mrnmrn1 Yeah I got a Medion (Aldi) computer from around 2003 where I can set any refresh rate I like, but I end up with 60Hz anyways, no matter the resolution.

@dru6809 3 ай бұрын

This is a cool plantronics compatible card. A real plantronics card today is probably extremely rare. Thx for sharing 👍 Also - the RGB2HDMI is truly amazing as an open source scan converter. This is a good demonstration of that

@terosaarela4555 3 ай бұрын

Check out some Sierra SCI games like Larry 2 and 3 or Codename: Iceman. Those have support for the Plantronics mode too.

@SkyCharger001 3 ай бұрын

the CGA 'gray' palette consists of a color set that has optimal Luma separation on composite. (which means that it gives the best grays on monochrome composite in 320x200 mode)

@djdoo 3 ай бұрын

Wow, color in Hercules hi resolution mode I mean it looked so crisp and High Definition for tha era especially imagine 16 colors in double resolution than CGA what a great finding Adrian! Plantronics is very nice also!! Keep Up great video as always, Cheers from Greece, Jim

@subynut 3 ай бұрын

That's pretty cool!

@KarlStevens 3 ай бұрын

In addition to kids technology, VTech also made PC clones that were sold in Canada. In the mid/late 90s, they split off their PC division which rebranded under "Tandex". The company I worked for at the time was their largest retailer (we started selling them after Commodore filed for bankruptcy.) I think this card was for an early model, as the ones we sold all had integrated video. (We started selling them around the time the 486DX was the "standard".)

@jeep_in_mb 3 ай бұрын

Yup, I worked many years for a Western Canadian Retailer of Vtech/Laser Computers. I have a sweet VTech Platinum badged Pentium 90 decked out with the Limited 5 Year Warranty Sticker. You won't see those anymore. Tandex declared bankrupcy in 2004. They were just cheap clones with cheap parts by then. I remember them using PCPartner Motherboards and the 486 would have been equipped with a Mozart Sound Card. I think one of my co-workers at the time may have one of these video cards in a very early XT/3 machine.

@simontay4851 3 ай бұрын

5:11 Why is U1 at the top left of the board unpopulated? What IC is it supposed to be?

@derekchristenson5711 Ай бұрын

That's a very cool video card, alright!

@euromicelli5970 3 ай бұрын

31:05 the underline generator active at the same time as color output, showing that this is indeed a hybrid mode of sorts. (Character attribute bit 0 means blue in CGA and it means underline in MDA; here, it does both)

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Interesting -- I noticed that stray underline on that one screen.

@Roxor128 3 ай бұрын

This may also happen on early MDA cards as well. They will actually output colour when connected to a colour monitor, as the attribute lines are connected to the pins that CGA uses for RGBI output. If you look through IBM's schematics from the 1981 technical reference manual, you can find these connections (they're removed in later versions). We'd need some testing done to find out for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does happen.

@Roxor128 3 ай бұрын

Idea for a video: A test-a-thon for finding MDA cards that will produce colour output. Early IBM ones have the attribute bits connected to the pins that CGA uses for RGBI output, so I'd bet quite a few clones do as well.

@alvaroacwellan9051 3 ай бұрын

A nice little card indeed!

@elffyb 3 ай бұрын

EGA also support 16 colors like that. I had a card back in the day that my friends had discarded and similarly I fooled with the jumpers until I got 16 colors on the CGA cable output on my CGA monitor. Check out the spec for EGA ... there are probably a lot of games out there that support those 16 color modes. I was able to play many of them with this card.

@zxrenew5642 3 ай бұрын

That is cool!

@tschak909 3 ай бұрын

20:32 - 320x200 x 4 shades of grey is basically just turning the colorburst signal off. This has the effect on a real CGA card of switching to the alternate palette pair, which, as you see, one of them is red, cyan, white, black.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Ah ok that makes sense. A high res composite mode then. Cool!

@anthonyblacker8471 3 ай бұрын

Wow.. reference to CSHOW.. what a blast from the past that one is.. ha.. BBS and cshow and the long wait.. haha

@asanjuas 3 ай бұрын

with this card you can play sierra adventures at 640x200 16 colors perfectly. For example sierra quest using the driver for plantronics for this graphical adventure games.

@stepheneickhoff4953 3 ай бұрын

I think the Laser Turbo XT I had as a child came with this card installed. We upgraded to the Vtech 256K EGA card, but we kept the old one and I remember trying it in various systems I picked from junk piles. I think I may have even tried using it in HGC mode in my 486 running OS/2, because OS/2 had primitive multi-monitor support that only worked if the second card was mono, I think.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

I'm pretty sure one of the cards I have came from a parts Laser XT machine I was given at some point, so it definitely tracks :-)

@jordanhazen7761 3 ай бұрын

Yep, MDA & Hercules always mapped their video memory to 0xB0000-B7FFF, while CGA was an 0xB8000-BFFFF, and EGA/VGA took the latter range along with 0xA0000-AFFFF, right above the 640K boundary. So, in the days before there were PCI cards capable of shifting their frame buffers to different addresses (early ones sometimes needing the video BIOS chip pulled or reprogramed on a second card), MDA was the only thing that could coexist with other types. Original PC-DOS & MS-DOS even had primitive dual-head support, via MODE MONO & MODE CO80/CO40.

@danaeckel5523 3 ай бұрын

Ohh that card is cool. If they would have sold it with the features advertised it would have been system builders #1 pick at the time. Now I have to wonder if it maybe has some sort of color hi-res mode hidden in there somewhere.

@mikesilva3868 3 ай бұрын

Great 😊

@wesley00042 3 ай бұрын

Starflight's Hercules mode had major vertical squish too.

@eftalanquest 3 ай бұрын

i wouldn't be surprised if there was a more expensive and more feature rich version of this card at least planned with the only real difference being the jumpers installed on it

@SimonZerafa 3 ай бұрын

I wonder what the code in the Video BIOS looks like and if that might reveal any other new modes which were undocumented? 😁🤷‍♂️

@retrozmachine1189 3 ай бұрын

VTech was a bit like that in general, sometimes there'd be hidden gems with unusual levels of compatibility yet at other times things could be lack-lustre. The keyboard controller on their motherboards wasn't quite fully compatible (the program running on the i8042) with the IBM implementation so could have issues with OSes that flipped between real and 80286 protected mode such as Netware 2.x in non-dedicated mode.

@paulstubbs7678 3 ай бұрын

Wow someone who knows of Netware non dedicated. I've actually got a Netware 2.16 box here with the non dedicated bit being used to 'control my house'. It's a 486 so kind of crazy that it still works. Mostly up for 30+ years

@shiroshine7227 2 ай бұрын

I use toggle switches for some jumpers if im testing.

@thepirategamerboy12 3 ай бұрын

I knew before even watching that it'd be Plantronics compatible, I just had a feeling that'd be the surprising feature. Why were there seemingly so many Plantronics compatible CGA cards if "nothing" ever used that graphics mode?

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

This is the only CGA card I have that has Plantronics mode. My other clone cards can only do Hercules monochrome and normal CGA. (They are later implementations with just one large IC, DRAM and a ROM.)

@AureliusR 3 ай бұрын

Yay early access! :) Super cool card.

@melarryo1676 3 ай бұрын

WOW! I wish knew this back in the day. I think they purposely did not allow this mode due to copyright infringement.

@DaT0nkee 3 ай бұрын

Maybe it even supports Hercules InColor?

@llwellyncuhfwarthen 3 ай бұрын

Now I am curious about the card and what the U1 chip socket would be used for.

@coyote_den 3 ай бұрын

I had a Mitsubishi DiamondScan 14" (AUM-1381) that would have done that color MDA mode. Had composite NTSC BNC input, but it could also sync from 15kHz to 40kHz on the RGBI or analog RGB inputs. At one point I managed to misconfigure the C128's VDC to output something higher than 15kHz/60Hz. Text wasn't right, but the monitor had stable sync.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

I actually have that exact monitor! I need to try it out. I had to do a CRT swap because the original tube was completely shot. It works better now but I never got the convergence quite right. :-(

@coyote_den 3 ай бұрын

@@adriansdigitalbasement2 oh yeah mine had a weak tube, was much better after I went inside and turned the G2 up. Still took a long time to fully warm up but looked good once it did. Got it for like $25 at a government surplus sale back in the late 90s, so I'm not complaining. My guess is it had been run 24/7 for years. Had my C128 on it via composite and RGBI, and a SNES connected via analog RGB.

@jordanhazen7761 3 ай бұрын

I had one of those too, acquired secondhand in the 90s after its prime, and wish I'd held on to it. Am I remembering right that the RGB input was on a DB-25 connector, or something similarly weird? Had to solder up a custom adapter, in any case. The only thing that wasn't great on that monitor was its comb filter for chroma/luma separation, which gave the worst NTSC dot-crawl I've ever seen (possibly made worse by the high-resolution tube).

@porklaser 3 ай бұрын

When toying with composite CGA I needed to employ a bunch of tuning with both the Retrotink 5x and my extron scaler but I did get it working pretty good. (Tested on a 286) I have much better luck RGB2HDMI color artifact simulation and lets me play those few old games without a hitch. While in DOS you can throw it in to 40 column mode which gets you more readable text while in artifact mode: mode CO40 The RGB2HDMI I'm using more and more lately it's a fantastic device

@tenminutetokyo2643 3 ай бұрын

The 245N!

@kevincozens6837 3 ай бұрын

The board also appears to have another place for headers. It is located to the right side of the left-most ASIC. I also wonder what was the purpose of the unpopulated U1 in the top left corner of the board.

@darkhelmet169 3 ай бұрын

VTech kept making computers until at least the mid 90s. I have a Laser 486 with a VTech chipset on the motherboard (and weird SystemSoft BIOS that freezes with Speedsys).

@horusfalcon 3 ай бұрын

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Computer Archaeology with Adrian Black! 😄 Seriously, man, this is the kind of stuff that keeps me here. Great job on finding the full capability of this old card. (Bonus points if you wrote down the jumper settings and mod steps!)

@shawnpgorman 3 ай бұрын

I'm curious what the unpopulated IC slot is for?

@michaelallen1432 3 ай бұрын

I wonder if you could add a capacitor to the crystal to fine tune the clock.

@SammyRenard 3 ай бұрын

My memory is hazy but I seem to recall a plantronics mode for flight sim 4.x?

@francoisrevol7926 3 ай бұрын

wohoo Plantronics!

@jasonharmon4588 3 ай бұрын

The CGA 4-gray mode may not be an actual mode, but instead alternate 4-color selections which render well on 4 shade LCD monitors. I have a HP 200LX palmtop, and using the 4-gray mode makes text and menus far more readable than selecting normal 4-color CGA mode.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

I recall seeing David talk about that mode somewhere, and I think it really does display in black and white with two shades of gray as well. Maybe it works on Commodore PC machines?

@The8BitGuy 3 ай бұрын

It really is supposed to be grayscale. I've never found a CGA card that will support it, though.

@tw11tube 3 ай бұрын

This mode is supposed to be grayscale *on composite output only*. The color burst generator is disabled in this mode, and the four RGB colors are chosen in a way that the resulting gray scale levels are sensible.

@NikolaiKostadinov-dc7jq 3 ай бұрын

I know MDA was very ahort lived but man i love those monochrome monitors. I have one of my own the ASI HH-1200 (clone of Hitachi's monitor) but finding an MDA card for them is quite hard for cheap at the same time.

@jordanhazen7761 3 ай бұрын

Some EGA cards could drive an MDA display, but I can't remember if they'd display a full 720x348, or only 640x350. I kept an MDA/Hercules in my Linux workstations for as long as ISA slots still existed to accept them, and used a kernel patch to allow different text consoles to appear on the VGA & MDA (using left & right Alt separately to switch), or to keep one text console active alongside a graphical X desktop. This was possible because the MDA had its own memory space at 0xB0000-B7FFF that didn't conflict with any subsequent standards, other than an EGA operating in MDA mode. Even in plain DOS one could do MODE CO80 & MODE MONO to switch back & forth, and I remember a DesqView hack for making better use of the two simultaneously.

@NikolaiKostadinov-dc7jq Ай бұрын

@@jordanhazen7761 Well either way i got my hands on a video-7 VEGA card which supports all 3 modes of video MDA,CGA and EGA on both XT/AT platforms. Got it for only for like 10 bucks haha. I have try it soon when i fix my MDA monitor's power supply. Thanks for the info. As for compatibility, i read somewhere on the net that CGA and MDA have unofficial cross compatibility if you wire the cables right. How true is that is unknown to me. Cheers.

@Stoney3K 3 ай бұрын

The fact that it displays 720x350 in text mode color makes me wonder if this one is a limited Hercules InColor clone, which was basically a color version of the Hercules. Is there any software or games that use those modes?

@MonochromeWench 3 ай бұрын

Colour MDA, a neat trick. The character attribute bytes in the frame buffer have mostly the same format in monochome and colour modes, no doubt IBM did this to make it easier to write software (mda uses any non white background colour is black and any non black foreground is white which meant coloured text on the same colour background should be readable in true MDA but unreadable in colour, not very useful but something you'd put in a conformance test, the cga tester has a test with text on same colour background and the monochome output should reveal the text that can't be seen when using color if it's properly compatible with MDA). Ultimately the timeframe for this trick being useful would have been very short as EGA had highres colour text and then vga happened boosting the res again. Changing a vga card into cga text mode, ugh, its just all sorts of wrong

@Roxor128 3 ай бұрын

A few text adventures took advantage of the similarity between CGA colour and MDA attributes to have a header at the top of the screen that was underlined on MDA and coloured blue on CGA.

@michelleshaw337 3 ай бұрын

Colour Monochrome mode - now there's a contradiction, isn't there?

@wizard-pirate 2 ай бұрын

In a literal sense without the context behind what "monochrome mode" means. You can still run monochrome mode and get color, it seems.

@Fezzler61 3 ай бұрын

I wish we (vintage computer community) could get the expense of a RGB/CGA TTL-to-VGA/HDMI convertor (like the open project created by Hoglet67) down. $100+ is too expensive.

@danfrench5221 3 ай бұрын

have a question I have a mossfet that I want to change that had three pads or I'm sorry four pads on it to connect when I took the old one off now I've got one pad and a Big Blob across the other part I use a solder Wick took all the solder off but it's still a big long blob did I ruin something not real good at doing this

@RickThornquist 3 ай бұрын

Interesting!

@jbinary82 2 ай бұрын

Does it run doom? Fastdoom has Hercules in color support

@twocvbloke 3 ай бұрын

Based on others' comments, it seems IBM intentionally hobbled the colour mode as not to affect sales of other models they were selling, rather daft policy that, "We have this great product here, and it can do so muchat a low cost, buuuuuut, we want people to buy the super-expensive stuff instead so just neuter it!!!", shot themselves in the foot there I'd say... :S

@DAVIDGREGORYKERR 3 ай бұрын

Is That PLANTRONICS Mode or what.

@SonicBoone56 2 ай бұрын

Definitely a card worth making reproductions of.

@wizard-pirate 2 ай бұрын

Good luck with those ASICs on board. That would be pretty sweet though.

@jaybrooks1098 3 ай бұрын

16 color sierra games work in plantronics mode

@AndreDeLimburger 3 ай бұрын

Colour in Hercules mode? I recall some software back in the day listing a colour variant of the Hercules card in the video card list. Perhaps this card supports even more modes.

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Hercules did make a bunch of color cards after the success of their widely copied first card: retrocmp.de/hardware/hercules-card/hercules-card.htm I'm not sure what software actually supports the modes these cards run at. One of them can do 16 colors in 720x384 out of a palette of 64. Reading the features, it seems to be used in conjunction with EGA monitors, so it's running at 60hz, not the 49hz of the original MDA standard like this card (and original Hercules cards) were running at

@jandjrandr 3 ай бұрын

That would have been the coolest CGA card. It almost would have early obsoleted the EGA cards before their time if it came out early enough with those features enabled. I wonder why they were turned off by default?

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Part of me thinks it was an unlicensed implementation? It might explain why Plantronics compatible cards are not that common.

@jeromethiel4323 3 ай бұрын

V-TEC just kicked in, yo!

@rzerobzero 3 ай бұрын

What did you mean by "dark yellow is brown on the right there." when showing that Text Colors Test at 7:44?

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Brown on CGA mode is a hack, and it's actually dark yellow. IBM implemented a little mod inside the old 5153 monitor to display dark yellow with additional red mixed in, to make it appear brown. Here is an entire article about it: nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2023/03/the-saga-of-color-brown-in-early-years.html

@the_kombinator 3 ай бұрын

Link to the card itself? I'd love to see how my Multisync II takes this. *Edit oops for some reason I thought this was a new CGA card via Aliexpress or whatever.

@tony714keene 3 ай бұрын

What I know about Vtech is for little kids and up too 12 years old electric toys

@osgeld 3 ай бұрын

skip to about 19 min in if you just want to get to the point

@JASPACB750RR 3 ай бұрын

I’m trying to learn Chinese so I’m watching your channel for a beginner course. As everything I heard for the past 36 minutes sounded like Chinese with a couple English words thrown in here and there to me. lol.

@serpent213 3 ай бұрын

加油

@erickvond6825 3 ай бұрын

Nice hack.

@Poki3 3 ай бұрын

"It supports color on monochrome" - wat?

@X-OR_ 3 ай бұрын

Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye

@kargaroc386 3 ай бұрын

You really ought to clean the flux off after a soldering job!

@user-qs4kz7bh5p 3 ай бұрын

The sleeping beauty awaken.

@markphillips8019 3 ай бұрын

Composite NTSC = YUCH!!!!. Gimme PAL any day. It was worth the wait here in Europe for PAL to finally arrive. 625 lines and colour at 4.43MHz

@simontay4851 3 ай бұрын

Title correction: has a couple OF surprising hidden features. OF!

@adriansdigitalbasement2 3 ай бұрын

Thanks! Fixed!

@mz4637 3 ай бұрын

@jowi_24seven43 3 ай бұрын

You speak way too quickly in this video. Cool down a bit. I can follow but it's stressful. Love your uploads otherwise!

@genesistd6630 2 ай бұрын

oh you could play it with 0.75x speed , its very very clear and its totally usable

@EgonOlsen71 3 ай бұрын

Boy...did it really need 20min. of talking to come to the point here? I get that you wanted to give some context, but this was far too much talking before anything interesting happened IMHO.

@uomoartificiale 3 ай бұрын

You're entitled to vent your grievances, but most of us watch Adrian for exactly that reason. A guided tour of something not immediately notable but interesting nonetheless. I'd say this channel is mostly this, what'd you expect from a video about a cga clone card?

@MrUSFT 3 ай бұрын

He started doing tests at 6:50. Also, what most of us find interesting is what the thing does, how it does it, and how it's novel compared to other hardware. Most of that needs to be communicated via talking.

@volvo09 3 ай бұрын

@@uomoartificiale yeah, I just finished the video and I love the "rabbit holes" of historical and background information he goes down.

@nickwallette6201 3 ай бұрын

Yep. Wrong mindset for this channel. This is basically a place for nerds to hang out and nerd out over nerdy things. If that's not the kind of thing that perks up your ears, then you're probably not going to love this little corner of the Internet. Some of us here are likely routinely disappointed at how technical details are glossed over or ignored entirely. Here, they are not, and that's exactly by design.

@EgonOlsen71 3 ай бұрын

@@nickwallette6201Nope! I'm a retro collector, I'm a coder, I'm a nerd, I'm also a Patreon of Adrian and I watch his channel for years now...but sometimes, I would like him to come to the point a bit quicker. That's all. Watching 20min. of babbling without anything new or interesting happening is too much for me, at least on some days, I guess.