@MaxWar: Thanks for testing the ATI VGA Wonder XL! I've copied your results to the table in the first post.

MaxWar wrote:

I wonder if results would be different if i was using an actual CGA monitor, as this card does have a cga connector on it!

At least it would fix the vertical refresh rate. 😉

At this point another difference between CGA/EGA and VGA has to be mentioned: Double scan in low resolution modes. VGA monitors never really display just 200 lines, instead they double the resolution to 400 lines by displaying each line twice, which looks quite a bit different than on a real CGA/EGA monitor.

Round42 is a good "real world" test, as it is freely available, uses some of the CGA textmode manipulation tricks and heavily depends on system speed. I had a hard time getting it to work on my 486. It required turning the caches off, reducing CPU speed to 8 MHz and slowing down memory timings.

I guess the 8x8 font display result should have the "[4]" note next to it, since he did mention minor font differences.

5u3 wrote:

At this point another difference between CGA/EGA and VGA has to be mentioned: Double scan in low resolution modes. VGA monitors never really display just 200 lines, instead they double the resolution to 400 lines by displaying each line twice, which looks quite a bit different than on a real CGA/EGA monitor.

Yes. Or, just to provide a [very] rough illustration:

(from Direct3d-enabled DOSBox, using gulikoza's CRT.D3D.fx shader)

MaxWar wrote:

Then he says himself that the card is known for 100% cga compatibility, that probably means he tested it with his own tester?

well I dropped him a line about it, can't hurt to ask 😜

He doesn't have the Eagle II board anymore so he never got to really test it with his program, but he does remember a few details at least... seems like it's at least in the same league as those 4 boards already tested, so it would be a worthy addition to this thread in case someone captures an Eagle in the wild, haha.

Here's what he says - there's also a heads-up about other things he's been working on... just passing this along, since he asked, and since I'm sure others here would find it interesting too 😁

Trixter wrote:

I'm tickled that my work is useful. I'm working on a comparative system benchmark that I hope to finish in two months that I think people will find even more useful, since it answers a lot of historical questions and also makes DOSBOX a little bit more useful. I'll obviously blog about that when it's done, including asking for vogons/queststudios/vintage-computing beta testers.

I did indeed write that about the Cirrus Logic card -- a card I no longer own, sadly. The card came with a utility much like the ATI setmode utility, or the Paradise MODE command, both of which altered VGA to emulate CGA (even the hardware cursor, 3rd palette, and 8x8 font), even when booting the machine. But I don't have that card any more, and as such, cannot back up the claim I made in 1997 when I wrote that guide. All I can tell you is what I remember: The utility made the card go into 200-line mode, used an 8x8 font, emulated the third red-white-cyan palette, background/overscan/highresforeground color changes worked (ie. writes to the color index worked), cursor emulation worked, and cell height also worked (the "160x100" tweakmode for lack of a better term). I do *NOT* remember testing: Display positioning, start address tweaking, interlaced mode, higher row/column modes, or if the monitor was now operating at 60Hz like it is supposed to (VGA default is 70Hz). So my claim should be taken with a grain of salt, I guess.

Please pass this along (in fact, you can pass along this entire message if you like): For those wondering why I have disappeared from the vogons/queststudios/vintage-computing forums for a few years, it's because I needed to dedicate all my free time into my career, and what little bit of that was left, into MindCandy 3 (www.mindcandydvd.com). I simply didn't have anything left other than email correspondence during that time period. The good news is that my career is stable, and MindCandy 3 is about two weeks away from going gold. Once that's done, I'm going to go back to retrocomputing again. The aforementioned benchmark will likely be my first project, with the "soundcard museum" project (not its real name) coming after that. And a friend and I have been playing around with some new technical ideas that make an IBM PC+CGA (and the PC speaker) do some pretty incredible things, so that might come in the next few months as well. Finally, I have some PCjr ideas I'd like to explore. I am on track to come back to the scene, be patient 😀

Trixter looks like a nice guy! Sound card museum, pc speaker tweaking? This certainly is in my line of interests.

Btw, there was this wild eagle that i had found a couple days ago, but it could not leave the USA.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Cirrus-Logic-8bit-ISA … =item35b4f8dc9d

Somebody bought it yesterday, i hope he will make the test and post here. Hmm 256mb? 😁

KB...

I saw another guy list a P4 cpu with 512mb cache 😜

Bet that was expensive 😁

I wrote him and told him he should try to sell it to the nasa or something, that it was the only one in existence and probably worth several millions.

I just ran this utility on 2 EGA cards - ATI EGA Wonder 800 and Paradise PEGA 1A. I mainly wanted to benchmark the two and see which is faster (The ATI was but its not that noticable in games) but I also ran the compatibility tests. Here are my results:

1Chipset:				EGA Wonder800	PEGA 1A
2                              
3----------------------------------------------------------
4Color Select Register 
5   Border/Overscan:				 fail		 fail
6   Med-Res. background:			fail		 fail
7   Hi-Res. foreground:			 fail		 fail
8   Med-Res. palettes:			  fail [7]	fail [7] 
9Textmode Manipulation 
10   40-column display:  			ok			ok
11   Hicolor backgrounds:			fail [8]	fail [8]
12   Cursor control:				  fail		 fail
13   8x8 font display:				ok		  ok
14M6845 Compatibility 
15   Vertical retrace:				ok			ok
16   Horizontal retrace:			 fail		 fail
17   Textmode row reprog:			fail	    fail
18   Textmode row/col reprog:  	fail		 fail
19   Display positioning:			fail		 fail
20   Start Address reprog:		  fail [5]	fail [5]
21--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
22
23[7] Cyan/magenta/white displayed only
24[8] Hi-intensity colors displayed only
25

I ran the above tests in both EGA and CGA modes (by changing the jumpers on the cards) however there was no difference in the results.

This is pretty interesting because it shows that not even EGA cards are truly backwards compatible.

The benchmark results (jumpered in EGA made):

EGA Wonder 800
block read: 581kb/s
block write: 815kb/s
interleaved read: 417kb/s
interleaved write: 607kb/s

Paradise PEGA 1A
block read: 435kb/s
block write: 435kb/s
interleaved read: 425kb/s
interleaved write: 412kb/s

I'm guessing there were no commandline utilities for those cards? I think the jumpers were just a standard EGA feature, meant simply to output the right signal for CGA monitors (with no effect on the card's register behavior, etc.), so I wouldn't expect them to help with the compatibility tests.

and yeah, generic EGAs had uniformly awful backward compatibility (including IBM's original, naturally). Way back when my dad upgraded our "turbo XT" to EGA, I was stoked to finally have color(!) - after the monochrome green monitor that used to go with the old CGA clone - only to find that many games were just broken now.

By the way, old issues of InfoWorld on Google Books are a great place to search for graphics card reviews, as they often examine CGA compatibility. Could turn up more boards that would be nice to test 😀
(e.g. - Video-7 VRAM VGA review says that "backwards compatibility with CGA, MDA, and the Hercules Graphics Card is provided by an included utility software disk")

VileRancour wrote:

He doesn't have the Eagle II board anymore so he never got to really test it with his program, but he does remember a few details at least... seems like it's at least in the same league as those 4 boards already tested, so it would be a worthy addition to this thread in case someone captures an Eagle in the wild, haha.

I have one not captured in the wild but already tamed in mine paper box 😉

So here are results, seen some compatibility problems in 6845 section vertical scrolling and some cursors are not shown. Dont have time to study and compare it to reference video, so i just made one with whole test recorded - you should tell if its ok or not. Haven't used any driver, just pure Win98 dos.

http://youtu.be/CObRykJVa3Y?hd=1

vlask wrote:

I have one not captured in the wild but already tamed in mine paper box :wink: […]
Show full quote

VileRancour wrote:

He doesn't have the Eagle II board anymore so he never got to really test it with his program, but he does remember a few details at least... seems like it's at least in the same league as those 4 boards already tested, so it would be a worthy addition to this thread in case someone captures an Eagle in the wild, haha.

I have one not captured in the wild but already tamed in mine paper box 😉

So here are results, seen some compatibility problems in 6845 section vertical scrolling and some cursors are not shown. Dont have time to study and compare it to reference video, so i just made one with whole test recorded - you should tell if its ok or not. Haven't used any driver, just pure Win98 dos.

http://youtu.be/CObRykJVa3Y?hd=1

Datasheet
http://82.114.193.227/vga2/images/stories/doc … l_gd510_520.pdf
thanks to Vlask for hosting the file in his museum 😀

Hmmm, according to the datasheet it should not need any kind of driver/command line or jumper settings. This card is smart and detects the kind of display the program wants and is supposed to work out of the box. Sadly, from what i saw in the video, it does not appear to have that fabled 100% compatibility 😜
Border overscan, textmode hicolor, cursor control, vertical retrace, Textmode row/col reprog , display positioning and Start address Reprog all failed. 🙁 did i miss any ?

@vlask: cool, thanks for testing :)

Obviously, these results differ from Trixter's info... but they actually do so in a very particular way, which might hint at what's going on:

- text modes on your monitor appear to be 400-line, consistent with stock VGA behavior
- *most* of the tests that fail seem to be running in text mode; so the key factor seems to be the absence of a true 200-line signal?
- Trixter mentions a command line utility to toggle this, but the datasheet doesn't
- the datasheet claims support for the IBM Color Display (5153), and the InfoWorld link on your site seems to say the same - so the card has to support true 200-line CGA modes somehow.

for example, the better part of the "cursor control" test seems to fail, but the results would actually make sense if you doubled the vertical heights... aka being in a 200-line text mode using the 8x8 font.

Does the card have a 9-pin TTL connector in addition to VGA? if so, it might just adjust its behavior if you hooked up a CGA screen.... I have a hunch that this would also fix the border/overscan, hicolor backgrounds, and vertical retrace tests at least.
Maybe there was a different revision that indeed included a utility to simulate this functionality on VGA monitors as well.

VileRancour wrote:

@vlask: cool, thanks for testing :) […]
Show full quote

@vlask: cool, thanks for testing 😀

Obviously, these results differ from Trixter's info... but they actually do so in a very particular way, which might hint at what's going on:

- text modes on your monitor appear to be 400-line, consistent with stock VGA behavior
- *most* of the tests that fail seem to be running in text mode; so the key factor seems to be the absence of a true 200-line signal?
- Trixter mentions a command line utility to toggle this, but the datasheet doesn't
- the datasheet claims support for the IBM Color Display (5153), and the InfoWorld link on your site seems to say the same - so the card has to support true 200-line CGA modes somehow.

for example, the better part of the "cursor control" test seems to fail, but the results would actually make sense if you doubled the vertical heights... aka being in a 200-line text mode using the 8x8 font.

Does the card have a 9-pin TTL connector in addition to VGA? if so, it might just adjust its behavior if you hooked up a CGA screen.... I have a hunch that this would also fix the border/overscan, hicolor backgrounds, and vertical retrace tests at least.
Maybe there was a different revision that indeed included a utility to simulate this functionality on VGA monitors as well.

Very good observation. If you look in vlask's museum, the card has both connectors. You search for pictures of the card on google, it usually has the two connectors. However the one that was sold on ebay recently only had the vga connector which means it comes in several flavors. Now the datasheet is for the chipset itself, what we would need is the user's manual for the specific card, or a driver disk that might contain additional informations about possible special command to switch the resolution, just like with the ATI wonder.

I tested it on vga monitor, dont have cga one, only 2 probably hercules monochrome monitors - dont know if they will usefull for anything than little smoke from them if that program sets wrong frequency 😀.

I found a CL-GD51 / 52 chipset based VGA/EGA video card. The two Cirrus Logic chips were covered by stickers saying "iMTEC", and so I removed them. From the Wikipedia page about Cirrus Logic, it says "CL-GD510 + 520 - ISA SVGA "Eagle II" chipset, known for 100% CGA emulation. (1988)".

Googling the FCC ID of GBC2UT20-0013, someone seems to think it's a "Renaissance Graphics RVGA II" graphics card. Edit: Also, the company Zymos may be involved in making these types of cards. End Edit.

Questions - does a Windows 3.x driver exist for it, or any DOS utilties, and also is there any information known about the card's DIPP switches? There are 8 of them, and it would be time consuming to test many combinations, to see which ones were for CGA / EGA / VGA / etc. Thanks a lot.

Edit 2:
I found the "WIN 3.0 RENAISSANCE SUPER RVGA-II DRIVERS". They are on the "shovelware" textfiles website, here. The file name is SR2WIN30.ZIP.

I found a bit more info about the card. According to this google books article (see image below), the card requires a "set video" video selection program, to switch graphics and text modes. Does anyone have this program, please? The image below doesn't look identical to the card I have. However, in this google books article, it mentions the RVGA II, and the photo does look identical to the card I have.

Nice find!

Have you already come across this thread on the Vintage Computer Forums? The DIP settings listed at the end could be a good starting point for testing.

> and the photo does look identical to the card I have.

Look again

Looks like it's the same chipset as the Video7 VEGA VGA card: http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/cl_vga.jpg
I have not played much around with this card regarding EGA compatibility.

On the driver disk there are several tools:

1CLR	 COM - Clear screen utility for enhanced text modes.
2DU	 COM - Directory listing utility.
3ESU	 COM - Enhanced text mode selection utility.
4INSTALL  COM - Install utility for VEGA VGA utilities.
5RAMBIOS  SYS - Software VIDEO BIOS.
6README	 COM - Type file README.TXT
7README	 TXT - This file.
8ROMDATE  COM - Displays the date of system ROM.
9VEGAANSI	 SYS - ANSI.SYS supports for enhance text modes.
10VEGA	 COM - Screen saver and emulation utility.
11DIAG	 COM - Diagnostics program for display adapter.
12V7VESA	 COM - VESA BIOS extension support
13MONFIX.COM	Program for PS/2 Analog monitors executing in CGA modes.

also drivers for Lotus 2.0, Presentation Manager, WordPerfect 5, Win 3.0 and Win 3.x

5u3 wrote:

Nice find!

Have you already come across this thread on the Vintage Computer Forums? The DIP settings listed at the end could be a good starting point for testing.

Thanks a lot for the info! Those DIP switch settings were very helpful!

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

> and the photo does look identical to the card I have.

Look again

Unfortunately, I am unable to spot any difference between my card, and the photo in the second link from my previous post.

elianda wrote:

Looks like it's the same chipset as the Video7 VEGA VGA card: http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/cl_vga.jpg
I have not played much around with this card regarding EGA compatibility.

On the driver disk there are several tools:

I was able to find the V7 Vega utility software. Some of this software did not work, because it complained that it could not find a Vega board, but other software did work. I tried the Vega.com emulation utility, like this:

Vega.com Pure:Off
Vega.com CGA:On

I then tried running the CGA Compatability Tester, from 5u3's link in his o.p., and noticed that my results were the same as Vlask's CL-GD510/520 results. For example, the Color Select Register -> Hi-Res. foreground test produced a corrupt screen: vertical stripes. I guess if I wanted better (best) CGA "emulation", then it is time to use the hardware DIP switch settings on the card, and put the card in to hardware CGA mode! (Is that the idea?)