http://www.ebay.com/itm/Everex-659A-EV659A-EG … =item19cd2614b1
It has a day left at the time of this posting. I'm not trying to be a shill, I just thought it was funny that anyone still had an EGA card new in the package!
hmmm I've even seen new CGA cards but that it comes with "Warranty" is a nice feauture...
wrote:hmmm I've even seen new CGA cards but that it comes with "Warranty" is a nice feauture...
How much of a warranty do you think they'll give on it? Everex probably doesn't exist anymore and even if they do, they won't be in any position to honor the warranty. How can they for something that has been out of production for so long? The seller is probably just warrantying it against DOA. The best you're going to do if it doesn't work is to get your money back, if you think you're going to get a free replacement, it's probably not going to happen unless the seller has a bulk lot of them.
I have no desire to use an EGA card in any of the computers I'm building, but it was what I had in my 286 originally so I thought I'd look it up. Then again, I do have an IBM 5150 that's non-functional, maybe it would be OK for that, if I get around to restoring it...
I had to suffer EGA graphics until 1994 and could never play Wolfenstein 3D like my friends did. That's one part of nostalgia I can do without.
wrote:I had to suffer EGA graphics until 1994 and could never play Wolfenstein 3D like my friends did. That's one part of nostalgia I can do without.
Ah i thought the same. I was so glad when i could switch my old 286 with monochrome green screen and hercules gfx for a descent 486 that came with a glorious SVGA card, Resolutions of 1024x768 in True COlor. Hail to the king! But yeah recently i found my love for old computers, ironically especially for monochrome stuff. The older, slower and uglier the merrier.
Hell i should buy a Vectrex just because of the cool vector screen.
Back then it was this or nothing. And i did a lot of things using a 286 with a monochrome monitor and a hercules card. I still have one combo card VGA/EGA/CGA/MONOCHROME card around here, working ( at least VGA).
Here is a picture of it.
You may be interested in 5u3's CGA compatibility thread here, as you have a Cirrus Logic CL-GD510A/520A ISA graphics card. They seem to do near perfect CGA emulation. Perhaps you could run those tests mentioned in 5u3's thread, and see if the "M6845 vertical retrace compatibility test" works? That's the test that my 16-bit GD510/520 card failed.
Somewhen around 1988 our family were the proud owners of a 12 Mhz AT 286 from Laser. It had an EGA adapter, I think it was from Cirrus Logic as well. Like the picture above, it had dip switches to configure its behavior; when the machine arrived it was set to 'auto' mode (according to the sparse documentation), whatever that meant.
We'd been using it for several months, playing games like Police Quest and Test Drive and the like, when one evening something weird happened. Upon startup of Leisure suit Larry, I noticed the screen rendering speed was greatly increased, and gameplay was much more fluent. Remember, we thought the speed before the change was normal for the type of machine. Unfortunately, after a first reboot (common in those days) the speed increase was gone. So we went on trying to find the cause of the speedup. Only after several days, we found out what the cause had been; Paratrooper. No idea - still - what was exactly so special in that game that it caused 'something to change' in the graphics adapter, but it worked; all EGA games started after Paratrooper got a significant speed increase. So much so, that after we found out, paratrooper was installed in autoexec.bat! Luckily, the game could be exited very easily (ESC). Believe me when I say I know that game's intro tune.
By the time we started thinking of buying a new machine (think it was 1993 or so) I experimented with the before mentioned dip switches a bit, and found out that the 'EGA' mode configuration setting was speedy and didn't 'require' Paratrooper... 😳 😁
I also think back in horror of the times VGA games came to market that weren't supporting older standards like EGA or CGA. Just hearing adlib music with a black screen is not funny. 🙁
On a sidenote; the games Star Goose! and F29 Retaliator did weird things on that computer as well, triggering a crazy speedup of the system's internal clock (sometimes very handy). I don't know if they do the same for other systems besides that much beloved - and dreaded - 286. 😊
