rmay635703 wrote on 2023-06-14, 17:07:
Stranger is having a light pen header but no oscillator for CGA
I thought the same when I saw the header.
When was this card made? After 1990?
If so, I suppose it dropped CGA simply because it was obsolete at the time.
I can't imagine anyone in the western hemisphere still using CGA by the time VGA was popular.
Hercules/MDA still had a reason to exist.
The graphics were hi-res and professional users still had a demand for them.
They also were used in tandem with VGA cards for debugging purposes (in MDA mode; CodeView, Turbo Debugger etc).
Edit: Found something. Hm. It seems that Hercules and light pens are no contradiction.
"Some Hercules cards support a light pen.
Bit 1 of port 3BAh returns the lightpen sensor status;
any write to port 3BBh resets the light pen status. "
Source: https://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/mda.html
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