VOGONS


First post, by Great Hierophant

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I won this auction:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem … em=160026536360

I received my items today and they were in superb condition. The so-called Hercules card is the IBM Monochrome and Printer Display Adapter, but I know what each card looks like.

The second card is more interesting. It is a VGA card, its official name is the IBM PS/2 Display Adapter. It is the first and only VGA card IBM manufactured for PCs with ISA slots. (All VGA cards must come with at least 256KB of RAM.) IBM was focusing on the PS/2 with its MCA slots, and later IBM machines (PS/1) that used ISA slots generally used third party cards like everybody else or had on-board video. It is quite a find, but so obscure I could only identify it by the markings (I also had someone show me a picture of one.) Soon I will test the VGA to make sure it works.

Reply 1 of 6, by Mike 01Hawk

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Man, talk about old school. Congrats for getting it so cheap considering there was a bid war.

Dell Optiplex Gxpro: Built solely so I could re-live my SB16 days properly with newly acquired sound pieces: MT-32, SCB-55, and DB50xg 😀

Reply 2 of 6, by 5u3

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What a bargain! 😁
The VGA card is a rare find indeed. I wonder how it performs... Some people say it's even slower than a Trident or an OAK. 🤣

Reply 3 of 6, by keropi

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my 386sx/20 PS1/pro had an onboard 512kb vga... and having looked at the board I cannot recall a known name for a vga chip... but I do remember some OAK ones... maybe that's it...
in win3.0/3.1 one just used the standar vga driver...

oh, now I see it was a Texas Instruments vga... look here: http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=16918

Reply 5 of 6, by Great Hierophant

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The VGA card is a rare find indeed. I wonder how it performs... Some people say it's even slower than a Trident or an OAK.

I only tried it for a few seconds, just to make sure it worked, but it is no speed demon. Then again, IBM products were not known for being speedy, but for rock-solid reliability.

Reply 6 of 6, by Great Hierophant

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I was able to dump the BIOS of the VGA card. Interestingly, it is only 24KB in size. This is notwithsanding that every other VGA card ever made has at least 32KB of ROM. Hell, even IBM used a 27256 EPROM on the card, which is 32KB! Apparently, some of IBM's other cards used the addressing space where the last 8KB of ROM would be located, so they must have disabled the upper 8KB of ROM.

IBM’s VGA card uses a 24KB ROM at $C0000-C5FFFF, 6KB of scratchpad RAM at $C6800-C8000 and 2KB of scratchpad RAM at $CA000-CA800.

Also, this VGA card does not handle either mode 7 or mode F, the monochrome modes. I tried every mode with a mode switcher in DOS and those were the only two of the regular modes that did not work. I think this means that you can use an MDA or Hercules Adapter with this VGA card. Why you would want to is another question, but at least the option exists.

The card is quite slow in 320x200x256.