dondiego wrote:

The card detects the monitor as monochrome, there's no need to do anything. The trident utility to set color mode manually (smonitor c) works with all/most isa cards. It's smonitor.exe inside tvgautil.zip from old drivers.

By the way, can I defeat vertical banding on LCD?

Thanks, that's a good idea. I'd thought about making up an adapter cable, perhaps with dip switches, to set the ID pins. But it was going to be more trouble than it's worth (and costly). Getting one of those and just removing pin 12 is a nice simple solution.

How does the 8900D compare to a 9000B?

Weird. I didn't even know there was a 9000B. I always assumed the 9000i was the only member of the series, which itself was pretty uncommon compared to the 8900 series. I always assumed that the main difference between the 8900 cards and the 9000 cards was that the 9000 integrated the RAMDAC, but I can see that the 9000B has a discrete one like an 8900! I also never understood why many 8900s could take 1MB, but the 9000s almost always had just 512k.

I think that's comparable to Radeon 8500 and 9000 series scenario, where latter were inferior, i.e., bad marketing decision. But it seems like only 8 memory chips 8900D cards are fast enough to hit ISA bus limitation.

So the 9000, 9000B and 9000C do predate the 9000i afterall, but it seems the 9000 series was being sold alongside the 8900 for some unknown reason. Which series was supposed to be better? The integrated RAMDAC of the 9000i supports 15/16-bit colour modes, but strangely almost all the cards that exist are 512k which makes that feature basically useless.

According to wiki, there are also some odd chips for ISA like the 8900DR and the 9100B which I have never seen before. It also states the 8900CL and D support up to 2MB, but I've never seen a card with that configuration either.

9000 series was the low end stuff limited to 512KB, 8900 higher end that supports 1MB VRAM and 24bit color modes. One would think bigger number is better but that's not the case here.

like the 8900DR and the 9100B

Some rare integrated solutions?

The 8900DR is actually written as "8900D-R" on the chip. It's not clear how it's better or different than a regular 8900D.

Also, I am pretty sure later revisions of the 9000i could support 1MB. Is the 9000i really worse than the 8900D when both are equipped with the same amount of memory? Does the 8900 really do 24-bit colour?

I have both 9000i and 8900D and according to datasheet 9000i is limited to 512KB and 8900D can do 24bits and on my 486 I can use those modes too (as slow as they are).

I've got a 9000i with 512 KB of ram and i think it has a 16 bit RAMDAC. The driver diskette has drivers for the 8900D as well so they were sold at the same time. The 9000i was low end and performance wise probably was on par with the 8900C. 8900D had a FIFO buffer and was much faster.

Oh well, practical use of 8900D is anyway somewhat limited since it's not 100% compatible with modern monitors.

Doesn't this 9000i have 1MB?
http://www.vgamuseum.info/index.php/component … ent-tvga9000i-3

That looks like 1MB indeed. Also -3 on the model number, maybe that's some enhancement done to it. Datasheet for just TVGA9000i does clearly say 512KB and there's no address lines for more. Two banks of 256KBytes possible (9 address lines per 8bit bank). Seems to be 4x 8bit banks on it.

I have two theories. The first is that it's fake. The problem with this theory however is that at the time this would have been a very low end card (most people were into VLB and PCI), so there wouldn't be much point to faking. The second theory is that towards the end, Trident wanted to eliminate things from its product line and scrapped the 8900 while keeping the 9000 since it would be cheaper to produce. Maybe a very late data sheet has the information.

I am also pretty sure that there was a member on this board a few years back that claimed to have a 1MB 9000i, but I didn't believe him until he posted the picture.

So I've did some more testing with another 8900D card (pretty much identical to the first, but this one have only 512kb VRAM in sockets) and Quake took very huge dip down to 13.7fps in 320x240 mode. Looks like any 512kb 8900/9000 works in 16-bit memory mode and 1mb in 32-bit mode, but probably only in 8 chips configuration.

I've seen some 9000i cards that use four 128kx8 DRAMs rather than the more common 256kx4 DRAMs. I would assume this is to get 32-bit memory mode. These cards typically use the 9000i-2 or 9000i-3 variant.

If that's the case, they could be fast too.

I remmeber the 8900D being pretty darn fast in doom. Anyone remember these cards with the crazy looking ram chips?

https://www.ebay.com/itm/VINTAGE-TVGA8900D-TR … 7UAAOSwkNZUf7AP

I had one of these in HS and I remember it being pretty fast. Are those vram chips?