VOGONS


Reply 41 of 67, by dieymir

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Anonymous Coward wrote:

Doesn't this 9000i have 1MB?

Actually not, the 9000x are the low component version of the former 8900c that Trident release in order to compete better with AcuMOS graphic chips. All of them do not support more than 512KB

Anonymous Coward wrote:
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … ent-tvga9000i-3 http://www.vgamuseum.info/images/palcal/trident/496_vc512sa_trid […]
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http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … ent-tvga9000i-3
496_vc512sa_trident_tvga9000i-3_top_hq.jpg

What you have there is an uber cheap graphic card (I had a bunch of them back in those days) using *defective* RAM chips. Half of the rows have defects and the manufacturer disabled them using those small metal bridges located near the memory chips.

Reply 43 of 67, by Anonymous Coward

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Weird.

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Reply 44 of 67, by walterg74

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Guys, one doubt... the OP show his 8900D as a 1MB card. However, on the PCB it indicates top right that a jumper controls if the card has 256K or 512K.. So how does it have 1MB?

I am being offered an 8900D that also is supposed to be 1MB , but it seems to have just 2 memory chips?

Reply 45 of 67, by VileR

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walterg74 wrote:

Guys, one doubt... the OP show his 8900D as a 1MB card. However, on the PCB it indicates top right that a jumper controls if the card has 256K or 512K.. So how does it have 1MB?

The HY534256AS-70 are 1Mbit chips, and the board has 8 of them. Plus if you take a closer look at that printing on the top right it says "O:512K/1M C:256K".

I am being offered an 8900D that also is supposed to be 1MB , but it seems to have just 2 memory chips?

Ask for a pic and run a search on the chip model you see.

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Reply 46 of 67, by walterg74

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VileRancour wrote:
The HY534256AS-70 are 1Mbit chips, and the board has 8 of them. Plus if you take a closer look at that printing on the top right […]
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walterg74 wrote:

Guys, one doubt... the OP show his 8900D as a 1MB card. However, on the PCB it indicates top right that a jumper controls if the card has 256K or 512K.. So how does it have 1MB?

The HY534256AS-70 are 1Mbit chips, and the board has 8 of them. Plus if you take a closer look at that printing on the top right it says "O:512K/1M C:256K".

I am being offered an 8900D that also is supposed to be 1MB , but it seems to have just 2 memory chips?

Ask for a pic and run a search on the chip model you see.

Ah, you are right... I missed the 1M part... 😵

I have a pic, since it’s at an auction site, but I don’t think I can make out the writing on the chips

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Reply 47 of 67, by walterg74

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Ok, I gotta buy a vowel...

He told me the chips say: HM514270AJ8

Googling about it would seem the last 8 is for 80ns of the memory, so I guess that’s a little worse than the 70...now the specs say it is 256k x 16bit, so technically each chip is 512KB, but how exactly does that work/is addressed..?

Reply 48 of 67, by walterg74

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walterg74 wrote:

Ok, I gotta buy a vowel...

He told me the chips say: HM514270AJ8

Googling about it would seem the last 8 is for 80ns of the memory, so I guess that’s a little worse than the 70...now the specs say it is 256k x 16bit, so technically each chip is 512KB, but how exactly does that work/is addressed..?

Guess nobody knows about the addressing..?

Reply 49 of 67, by batmreload

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Thanks ALOT for this...My Trident 8900D has been annoying me for years with this issue! Worked like a charm

Spent 15 minutes between Cold and Warm boots...Color everytime!

TOTALLY worth the thread necro!

You may yell at me now if that is your pleasure 😁

EDIT: Forgot to mention that the video seems "cleaner" somehow too...

skitters wrote:
There's a fix for that starting in mono thing: […]
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InbetweenDays wrote:

The only good thing I can say about it is that the Trident gives me a monitor identification problem (starts in mono) on reboot whereas the 5429 doesn't.

There's a fix for that starting in mono thing:

Get a M/F VGA "gender changer" like this
https://www.amazon.com/BoNaYuanDa-Female-Coup … /qid=1520360154
(it doesn't actually change gender -- one site is M and the other is F)
Or you can use an extension cable.

Remove pin 12 on the M side of the gender changer.

Attach the gender changer to the Trident's VGA port and plug the monitor
into the gender changer.

The fix has worked for me with old Trident and Oak VGA cards -- no more unwanted starting in mono.
My brother found this fix, but can't remember where he found it.

Here's a description of the VGA pinout:
https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/com … deo/vga-15-pin/
Removing pin 12 forces color.

Reply 50 of 67, by GigAHerZ

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InbetweenDays, it seems that the CL card has a spot for a jumper and if i read it correctly, it's marked as "0WS". If that's correct, it should change some wait state setting from 1 to 0, therefore making the card faster. 😉

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 51 of 67, by appiah4

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This is my 8900D with 1MB RAM; it's a very fast card indeed. For reference in case anyone is hunting for something similar:

Trident-TVGA8900-D.jpg

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Reply 52 of 67, by diagon_swarm

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walterg74 wrote on 2018-06-28, 23:35:

Ok, I gotta buy a vowel...

He told me the chips say: HM514270AJ8

Googling about it would seem the last 8 is for 80ns of the memory, so I guess that’s a little worse than the 70...now the specs say it is 256k x 16bit, so technically each chip is 512KB, but how exactly does that work/is addressed..?

It works the same way as 1MB versions with eight 4-bit chips. 8*4=32bit memory bus. In this case, you have two 16-bit chips, each connected to a half of the Trident chip's memory interface. Thus, you have 1MB composed from a smaller number of chips that have wider data bus a and higher capacity. At the end, it does not matter.

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Reply 53 of 67, by diagon_swarm

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InbetweenDays wrote on 2017-11-22, 06:16:

Since the 8900 cards have a reputation for being slow, I decided to get something better. After some research, following recommendations here and Vlask's VGA museum posts & benchmarks, ...

Vlask made a mistake that his 8900D was fitted with just two out of eight 4-bit chips and due to this, the memory was connected only using 8-bit interface.

Vintage computers / SGI / PC and UNIX workstation OpenGL performance comparison

Reply 54 of 67, by Pentium Baron

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I was pretty shocked to see that my 8900D-R ISA has chips manufactured in 1999. Also I completely got rid of horrific vertical banding on Dell U2412m by bumping pixel clock from default 50 to 70.

Retro business software junkie. Currently rocking Macola Accounting + Symantec Time Line

Reply 55 of 67, by GigAHerZ

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Pentium Baron wrote on 2021-08-18, 09:37:

I was pretty shocked to see that my 8900D-R ISA has chips manufactured in 1999. Also I completely got rid of horrific vertical banding on Dell U2412m by bumping pixel clock from default 50 to 70.

How do you "bump the pixel clock"?
AFAIK, pixel clock is a combination of resolution and refresh rate.

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - And i intend to get every last bit out of it even after loading every damn driver!

Reply 56 of 67, by Pentium Baron

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GigAHerZ wrote on 2021-08-18, 09:38:
Pentium Baron wrote on 2021-08-18, 09:37:

I was pretty shocked to see that my 8900D-R ISA has chips manufactured in 1999. Also I completely got rid of horrific vertical banding on Dell U2412m by bumping pixel clock from default 50 to 70.

How do you "bump the pixel clock"?
AFAIK, pixel clock is a combination of resolution and refresh rate.

On my monitor it's just an OSD menu item you can adjust up and down. With my card/monitor combo the banding show up only at 700x400 (which is what monitor thinks input source is)

Retro business software junkie. Currently rocking Macola Accounting + Symantec Time Line

Reply 57 of 67, by 386SX

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Anyway the CL-GD5429 while not being the fastest video chip, still it was a fast one and quite rare on ISA bus. It does have an improved BitBLT engine and faster chip clock accelerating the Win GUI impressively well and even in msdos games results being a very good card much better than others. I have a 1995 built card with 1MB DRAM and on the Am386DX-40 Doom frame rate improved, Win 3.1x benchmarks results was very good.
Even if low-middle end still they were VLB oriented video chips with ISA retrocompatibility so we can say being one of the more advanced chips for any ISA mainboard beside which is the fastest (not that it make much difference for ISA bus at least in msdos).

Reply 58 of 67, by mockingbird

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Sorry to necro, but I must know: Is the Trident 8900D really that much faster than the 8900CL?

With PhilComputerLab's DOSBENCH, I tested Doom (fast systems) on both a CL-GD5424 (ISA, not VLB) and a 8900CL (As well as a 9000i) and got the following:

CL-GD5424: 22.34FPS
8900CL: 12.33FPS (and the 9000i did not fare better).

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Reply 59 of 67, by Tiido

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Yeah, D is a lot faster than CL. 8900D should have performance that is similar to that of the Cirrus you have, it is definitely among the fastest ISA video chipsets.

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