Thanks for the feedback! My dad also liked the Trident 8900. Had one in his 386. I believe it either was a B or D revision.
Anyway, the Trident 8900 never caused me any troubles and is also the official graphics card in DOSemu.
What I like about it is its ability to switch to different video modes like CGA, EGA and MGA (Hercules) by using a mode utility.
In an XT-machine, this comes in handy. So someone can force a specific video mode, if a games uses auto detection.

It can be a bit hit and miss in my experience. Some VGA chips will work in an 8-bit slot, but the card's BIOS contains AT instructions, so won't work on 8088/8086 systems.

I have a couple of Trident 8900D based cards, and only one of them works in PC or XT systems.

Making a list of compatible cards sounds like a great idea.

I have a Trident 8900D card which unfortunately does not seem to work in an XT clone system even with the 8-bit jumpers set, which I assume is due to the bios containing AT instructions as mentioned above. The bios is marked C4.5.

I wonder if it would be possible to downgrade the bios to a compatible one. Not sure if it's accurate but dosdays.co.uk lists the only other known bios version for this card as C4.4 so perhaps this is the version that works. Can anybody confirm this? It would great if somebody could dump this bios version so that I can try it out.

I will have to get an XT eventually, to test my cards. Too bad those are made of platinum nowadays...

I think the bigger issue is that most BIOS for 16bit cards is built on 286+ cpu instructions, thats what I ran into, and running a V20 mitigates it a bit