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Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-18, 07:43

It should be noted that various BIOSes provide the 640x480x16M mode via different numbers: --------V-1010E0----------------------------- INT 10 - VIDEO - Diamond Speedstar 24 - SET 24-BIT GRAPHICS MODE AX = 10E0h BL = video mode (see also #00010 at AH=00h) 2Eh = 640x480 Return: ??? SeeAlso: AH=00h, …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-18, 04:36

The utilities/dos drivers that seem to come with ET4000AX cards don't seem to supports higher color vesa modes than 8bpp no matter what ramdac you have and that applies to the version of them that comes with speedstar24 cards. Only way I have been able to get the higher color vesa modes to work in …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-17, 16:55

I'd say the "BIOS is DAC specific" myth is now busted Indeed. Now I'm wondering about the meaning of the "SpeedSTAR 24 " name... I suspect the card was designed for 24-bpp since the very beginning, and even though some cards were shipped with 8-bpp or 15-bpp RAMDACs, there was always the upgrade …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-17, 16:17

I'm curious what is the deciding factor to look for in the datasheet then just the SRAM size? ^^ also isn't it possible to bypass the SRAM alltogether and drive the DACs directly? With 8-bpp RAMDACs - eg. KDA0476 or KDA0478 - it isn't possible to bypass the palette SRAM. It's possible with HiColor …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-17, 13:32

Fascinating... Now it would be worth to see how does that BIOS behave when it's running with the SC11483 (15-bpp), but some software tries to enter a 24-bpp mode - returns some error, or blindly sets the mode resulting with garbage? The former would suggest there's some run-time RAMDAC detection, …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-17, 10:48

True, but I thought it is better to be safe than sorry. Also if someone has cards with diffent ramdacs they can choose the one that has the same ramdac just in case. BIOS is just software, it's extremely unlikely that mismatched BIOS can do any harm to the hardware. But it's not a good idea to …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-17, 03:53

what is the KDA0478 then? KDA0478 is also 8-bpp, but from 24-bit palette Anyway, both KDA0476 and KDA0478 take 8 bits of pixel data at the input, ie. 256 colors but the pixel data doesn't describe the color directly - there's no R, G, B values there RGB values are kept in the RAMDAC's palette RAM - …

Re: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

Posted on 2020-11-14, 10:20

In other news, here is interesting case of a CGA game totally relevant to this thread - Rockford . Its creators didn't care about the colour mode, but focused on "how is it going to look on a monochrome monitor?" They did care about the color mode - on EGA. On CGA, however, the colors are indeed so …

Re: Best CGA & Hercules monochrome games

Posted on 2020-11-13, 07:14

Recently I got back to playing PC-Man (1982), probably the first Pac-Man variant for IBM PC. Very addictive game, with nice CGA graphics - doesn't use the awful default palette, and makes use of fill patterns to provide each of the ghosts with a different "color". A CGA-only game, of course - later …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-11, 03:40

I assume I can't put the chips that used to be in bottom right card into the top card because it has different ramdac chip? Probably not, but feel free to experiment. There's some chance the BIOS includes support for various RAMDACs, and auto-detects them at run-time. If not, I expect the following …

Re: Diamond Speedstar24 Bios versions

Posted on 2020-11-11, 03:23

Baoran wrote on 2020-11-10, 22:39: Do these cards need some kind of driver to be able to use vesa modes? I don't know about all BIOS versions, but yes, I had such a card with no VESA BIOS Extensions in the ROM. There's TLIVESA.COM from Tseng Labs, or UniVBE.

Re: Diamond SpeedStar24 with only 256 color RAMDAC

Posted on 2020-11-07, 22:59

It should be possible to use >8-bpp modes even without upgrading the BIOS, by using UniVBE. UniVBE is good at detecting the RAMDAC, and if not, it's possible to select one manually: uvconfig_000.png Still, it would be a good idea to do the BIOS upgrade, as there's some software which uses non-VBE …

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