What does your BIOS setup say? You can set the type of graphics adapter there. Some older 286 boards even have jumpers for setting the type of adapter.

I have the video adapter set to "80x25 color". Other modes in the list are "40x25 color" "80x25 monochrome" "40x25 monochrome" and "None". I have the video jumper set to color.

80x25 color should be CGA. Should be fine, IMHO. However, I have never owned a CGA card, nor a fitting monitor. So I do not know if there are any incompatibilities...

dkarguth wrote:

Oddly enough, windows 2.01 and 3.0a run just fine, and give no issues.
I ran the onboard American Megatrends video adapter test, and everything worked fine [..]

Hm. Windows 2.x uses monochrome mode, 640x200 (aka BIOS Mode 06h), maybe that's why it works.
Anyway, just thinking out loud. I'd try that CGA Compatibility Tester program for further testing. 😀
Maybe there's some issues with memory allocation of the CGA framebuffer, etc.

Some older motherboards have color/monochrome jumper on them. Might that have anything to do with this problem?

I have already set the jumper to the color position. Another odd thing is that windows 3.0a setup identifies the card as a hercules monochrome card every time I run it. If I continue with setup with the hercules monochrome option selected, it garbles the screen and I have to reset the computer. However, if I force it to install in CGA mode, it installs just fine. I'm going to try that CGA tester program you specified and report back the results here.

Hm. Strange. Perhaps there's a Hercules card still in the PC ?
Some of the smaller clone cards can be mistaken easily for a serial-parallel combo card.

The first thing I tried was removing all other cards from the system. The only cards at this point are the CGA card and an Acculogic IDE/Floppy controller. The video card is an IBM OEM CGA adapter. Like the OG one from 1981.

hmmm, now edit.com and qb.exe default to 4 color monochrome, that's odd. It doesn't even give me an option to change it.

As far as i know some early Cards only run correctly at 4.77Mhz, and the 286 for sure has 8Mhz ISA Bus.

That would make sense. Is there a possibility I am damaging the card by essentially overclocking it? I don't want to ruin it, it's a pretty expensive card.

I don't know about IBMs CGA Card but the MDA Adapter will overclock, and therefore will not work fine with 8Mhz Bus Speed 😳

Problem solved by installing a VGA card. 🤣

One more thing though, Now that I have a VGA card in the machine I can't use my commodore 1084 monitor with it. I find this dissapointing because I quite like the aesthetic of the 1084 over more "modern" crt displays. I like how the 1084 sits flat on the desk without any kind of swivel base, has a smaller, more compact footprint, and that it is flat on top so you can set things on top of it.
Does anyone know of a VGA monitor that is more like the MDA/CGA/EGA era monitors in form factor?

^Um, you could hook up the VGA card to a Composite converter and keep the Commodore.
Sure, the picture is a bit blurry, but not that bad. See https://youtu.be/VZMme7Edx6s

I thought about doing just that. The only problem is that it does tend to get a bit soft with the smaller fonts. However, the commodore has some kind of unusual internal video sharpening circuitry that remedies this. If you plug in a composite source in composite mode, it looks like you would expect a composite source to look, kinda blurry and strange color artifacts everywhere. However, if you switch it to the SEP mode for the separate commodore luma-chroma signal and you don't have a commodore video source plugged in, it makes the composite source look almost like RGB. I'll have to go searching for the schematics sometime to see exactly what it's doing.

dkarguth wrote:

Problem solved by installing a VGA card. 🤣

One more thing though, Now that I have a VGA card in the machine I can't use my commodore 1084 monitor with it. I find this dissapointing because I quite like the aesthetic of the 1084 over more "modern" crt displays. I like how the 1084 sits flat on the desk without any kind of swivel base, has a smaller, more compact footprint, and that it is flat on top so you can set things on top of it.
Does anyone know of a VGA monitor that is more like the MDA/CGA/EGA era monitors in form factor?

Do the ubiquitous Sony studio monitors support VGA? They look similar in style to the 1084...