I found a picture of a box and "Ergo" seems to refer to supporting a 72hz refresh rate. Presumably the rest of the features are identical between the VRAM II and the Ergo, except for bugfixes.

Also, somebody bought the manual on Ebay a few months ago...whoever you are, please scan and upload it.

Most VGA cards will work fine if inserted into 8-bit isa slots. Including on XT clones - either 8088 or 8086.
The only cards that may cause problems are very late models based on Cirrus Logic GD-5434.

Your HT209 card looks newer and more sophisticated than my Headland HT208 card at: Can your VGA card provide a hardware source for random numbers? .

A Headland technical manual can be found at http://www.bitsavers.org/components/video7/70 … anual_Jun88.pdf , but I don't know which Headland cards/chips this "Headland V7 VGA" exactly relates to.

In any case, page 243 of the PDF documents the DIP switches on the board:

Next page mentions jumper settings, although your board does not seem to have any:

The fact that a board has DIPs/jumpers for enabling/disabling 16-bit operation is a good sign that it will support 8-bit ISA slots.

Also, Headland is probably the only manufacturer ever to have a dedicated hardware switch for disabling all manufacturer specific VGA extensions (DIP8 - Pure mode). Even if that is not particularly important, seeing that option makes me think high of the engineers, they had a careful attitude towards hardware development. (the data sheet overall shines of quality compared to datasheets from other manufacturers)

In Commander Keen 5 1.0 I did run into a timing related hardware quirk on this card that hidden sprites would appear out of random. I don't know why this card specifically would exhibit such glitches (I tested many other VGA cards in the same PC, Headland was only card to give those glitches), although it is well known the vsync implementation in Keen 5 1.0 struggles a bit, and the code was revised in several later versions.

(don't remember if I tested other Keen versions or the Fix Jerky Motion fix to check if that might have fixed it)

With that unique card, you get to play the most awesome and the only game ever developed specifically for Headland cards in mind: RNG Space Adventure 😁

pshipkov wrote on 2023-09-05, 04:30:

Most VGA cards will work fine if inserted into 8-bit isa slots. Including on XT clones - either 8088 or 8086.

That's good to know. Is it also normal for them to support DB9 TTL output with an adapter? I found an adapter on Amazon that looks right; I will give it a try.

clb wrote on 2023-09-05, 10:57:

Next page mentions jumper settings, although your board does not seem to have any:

There is a 3 pin jumper header marked E1 to the right of the HT209 chip. Hard to see in the picture. It came jumped with 2-3 jumped. This header is not present on pictures of revised VRAM IIs. It probably matches one of the four jumper settings you found; maybe it's memory disable because I don't have the expansion board.

I found a page of "Video Seven V-RAM Information" on minuszerodegrees, it seems close but I still don't think it's the VRAM II. But the DIP options appear to match your manual, so it's probably the same for all Headland ISA VGA cards. I wonder if V7VGA.COM is really necessary for CGA and where to get it.

This page mentions that the 8.05 BIOS I have is buggy: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php?ti … _Archive/102138 Maybe that's why this stock of cards (along with the MWaves) never made it into any PS/2s. I wonder if it would be possible to upgrade the BIOS.

clb wrote on 2023-09-05, 10:57:

With that unique card, you get to play the most awesome and the only game every developed specifically for Headland cards in mind: RNG Space Adventure 😁

Haha, what is that? CRT Terminator project looks cool. Do you need a Headland HT209? I can probably go get more of them.

I was also looking for V7VGA.COM utility at some point. There was a download link at https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/vi … o7_vga1024i.php to utilites, but the link is dead. Some other files are available there though.

Thanks for looking out - though I am located in Finland, so shipping and customs would probably already make it not worth the hassle. If you have a moment to run SNOOP on it to check if it does properly detect the HT209 variant, that would be interesting. SNOOP.EXE: (S)VGA adapter info tool and CRT Terminator config utility

clb wrote on 2023-09-05, 19:58:

There was a download link at https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/vi … o7_vga1024i.php to utilites, but the link is dead.

That link still works for me; V7VGA.COM is in the 1024i Util 1 disk, attached here. There is also a "VRAM-II ERGO Utilities Disk". It includes a nested zip that has V7VGA.EXE, which is labeled in the README as "Screen save and emulation utility," same as the .COM version is.