Nice work.

What are your opinions on the displays as well as the CGA vs EGA on the T5100 plasma screen? I see the noticeable differences, but I imagine (as with all pictures of a display) it is better to see it in person.

CkRtech wrote:

Nice work.

What are your opinions on the displays as well as the CGA vs EGA on the T5100 plasma screen? I see the noticeable differences, but I imagine (as with all pictures of a display) it is better to see it in person.

Thanks!

Metal Mutant looks the best on T5100 screen in CGA mode. That's because it then maps 4 colours to 4 intensities and game looks best. EGA mode tries to dither 16 EGA colors to map them onto 4 shades and it looks off. Dithering on T3100 is interesting and actually quite well done - but I'd still go for that CGA version on EGA plasma screen. Personally, I have a soft spot towards dithered CGA, as my first PC was AT with Hercules and I played games using simcga, which dithered CGA colours to display them on monochrome amber screen. So for me playing on T3100 is a bit of a trip down the memory lane. Objectively, though, T5100 screen is superior.

And the best ones are plasma VGA screens on T3200SX and T5200. Sixteen intensities make these EGA and CGA games look good (Loom EGA, for example). I actually played a bit of Wolfenstein, too, just for fun. That said your mileage might vary. Also, when these screens get old and are nearing the end of their life cycle (MTTF for them is about ten thousand hours of operation), they start showing more artifacts, like intensity change based on other pixels in line or column or occasional sparks appearing here and there at random. So plasma screen of older type but well preserved may look better than newer type that has been used a lot and is now slowly nearing end of its life. My T5200 doesn't look that great, despite theoretically being the newest and most advanced (VGA).

Serious necro-posting here but... the T5100 and T3200 can use a Toshiba utility called XCHAD which remaps EGA colours to user-selected four shades of orange. With it, the colours for EGA software can be dramatically improved, on a per-mode and even per-application basis. I agree that CGA looks better than standard EGA on the T5100/T3200 but with some careful selection of colours under XCHAD, EGA looks better.

Alex_C wrote on 2024-07-19, 08:05:

Serious necro-posting here but... the T5100 and T3200 can use a Toshiba utility called XCHAD which remaps EGA colours to user-selected four shades of orange. With it, the colours for EGA software can be dramatically improved, on a per-mode and even per-application basis. I agree that CGA looks better than standard EGA on the T5100/T3200 but with some careful selection of colours under XCHAD, EGA looks better.

That sounds really cool! Do you mean you need to tune color selection for every game/software? Or is there one selection that works well enough and is that setting generally better than the CGA variant?

Either, although it's better to fine-tune on a per-game basis. It's described in some detail in the T3200 user manual which is available online. You can load XCHAD as a TSR and then pull it up on-screen to adjust the colour settings, then write that to a batch file later to call it as non-TSR before a particular application. Some games take over the keyboard interrupt and don't allow it but it works in many, and always works in non-TSR mode (since it controls the Toshiba hardware, not the game). You can set different colour schemes for different screen modes too. It can make a huge difference.

Wow, this is VERY useful, thank you, Alex_C!

Where can this utility be downloaded?

The file itself from here: http://www.steptail.com/toshiba_t-series_supp … t:toshiba_t3200

The manual for the T3200, which explains the usage of XCHAD, is from minuszerodegrees: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Tosh … rs%20Manual.pdf (start on page 96 of the PDF, section 7 of the manual)/

Alex_C wrote on 2024-08-18, 19:48:

The file itself from here: http://www.steptail.com/toshiba_t-series_supp … t:toshiba_t3200

The manual for the T3200, which explains the usage of XCHAD, is from minuszerodegrees: https://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Tosh … rs%20Manual.pdf (start on page 96 of the PDF, section 7 of the manual)/

Thanks a lot!