VOGONS


First post, by pixel_workbench

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On several occasions I dealt with faulty graphics cards that shows garbage characters instead of English letters, like shown in the attached photo. Any ideas what's causing the problem? Faulty video memory, corrupted video bios, dying graphics chip?

Edit: The other thing I noticed is that there is a long beep during the POST sequence, before the normal short beep. But the system boots and the video driver installs as normal.

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Reply 1 of 2, by VileR

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Probably bad video RAM. Seems like a plague of "0" bits in at least some of the even bytes (but not the odd bytes, or you'd be seeing weird colors too).

Might also be a problem in a part of the chip itself (the vga sequencer) but that's probably far less likely.

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Reply 2 of 2, by Jorpho

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A famous problem.
https://superuser.com/questions/613702/what-e … ly-in-text-mode

I remember finding a simulator once that could let you experiment with seeing exactly how different "stuck" bits would present themselves, but all I can find right now is https://startwandowsngrmadly.com/ .