Pools of Radiance on a MDA Monochrome Monitor - Advice/Input needed \ VOGONS

Pools of Radiance on a MDA Monochrome Monitor - Advice/Input needed

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First post, by Alesia

Posted on 2025-06-25, 21:41

Alesia Offline

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Rank: Newbie
Posts: 33
Joined: 2024-07-30, 00:12

This is a bit of a long shot and beating a very dead horse but I've been trying to get Pools of Radiance running on my Turbo XT system. After a lot of troubleshooting I eventually learned that my specific video card (ATI Graphics Solution Plus, 8 dip switch model) needed a utility to be able to load any kind of graphics while a monochrome monitor was selected via the dip switches. 1 and 2 memory page monochrome graphics selections did not allow Pool to display anything, but the color text selection did - although with an obviously incorrect frame rate (vertically scrolling picture) so I reset the PC right away. Using the diagnostics tool I found that all color modes aside from the color text, which oddly does not scroll or have any kind of flickering issue in the diagnostics tool, had the same scrolling/flickering effect. Obviously unusable. The monochrome graphics tests were correct thankfully. I found a few blog posts suggesting this card might be able to display C/EGA graphics via a MDA friendly manner, but I was not able to find anything concrete in the ATI drivers/utilities/readmes for this card. I've avoided experimenting too much as damaging this monitor would put me out for both this turbo XT machine and the Nec V20 XT clone I have as well - both only have monochrome display cards.

I also took a look at the Small Wonder and EGA Wonder cards but for how many of them are on ebay and such, the price seems massively inflated and way beyond my reach even if they fit my needs. If anyone knows anything about the Graphics Solution Plus card I have, or an alternate solution I haven't noticed, I would love to hear about it. I'm not super set on getting specifically Pools of Radiance working per-say, but being hard stuck to MDA only would massively limit the games I could play on this PC. I am also not looking to upgrade this machine to VGA or color C/EGA as I already have a nice Emerson 286 that does color VGA graphics nicely. I am sorry I am in the wrong place but this straddles hardware and software issues so I wasn't 100% sure where to put it.

Specs that we are working with not that it matters all that much :

Hyundai Super 16 Turbo - 640k ram
ATI Graphics Solution Plus
Samsung MD-1254G Amber Monitor

Reply 1 of 2, by rmay635703

Posted on 2025-06-26, 03:55

rmay635703 Offline

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Rank: Oldbie
Posts: 1803
Joined: 2019-01-19, 19:32

History of ATi Graphics cards Vol. 1

It should support Hercules without much fuss.

In Hercules mode there are 3rd party CGA software emulators for Hercules specifically. (A strange cludge considering that should have CGA emulation out of the box)

Reply 2 of 2, by Alesia

Posted on 2025-06-26, 04:59

Alesia Offline

Rank Newbie

Rank: Newbie
Posts: 33
Joined: 2024-07-30, 00:12

rmay635703 wrote on 2025-06-26, 03:55:

History of ATi Graphics cards Vol. 1

It should support Hercules without much fuss.

In Hercules mode there are 3rd party CGA software emulators for Hercules specifically. (A strange cludge considering that should have CGA emulation out of the box)

Speaking of the CGA Emulation, it seems the previous owner had the Monitor set to EGA if I am pulling from memory (I have no idea how that worked) that I set to Monochrome later on. I re-tried the CGA Emulation dip switch selection just now after disregarding it due to a previously garbled picture, and it now works.....kind of. Graphical modes have a very slow vertical roll (more like the picture reaches the bottom and is rebuilt at the top, you can see the lines shoot up the screen) but nothing like the flashing rolling it was doing previously. Text modes still work perfectly so I'm not sure how to get it to behave, simply adjusting the vertical hold on the monitor would throw those out of wack. Progress though! I will need to try out the ALLTEST.COM and see what graphical modes have the rolling and such, it could be isolated to 80lines or a specific resolution I might be able to work around.

EDIT: All color tests in the alltest utility show a refresh rate mismatch between graphical color modes and the monitor (color text seems fine.) All modes have a slow top to bottom roll, except for 640x200 16 color which has a rapid bottom to top roll. Still progress being able to display graphics at all, but still need to fix this somehow.

Edit 2: A bit of an anticlimactic end, I put everything back to Hercules/mono (IE not CGA emulation) and tried out MGCIBM 2.02. I'm doing a bit of a voodoo ritual of setting the card to 2 page memory mono graphics mode and then loading MGCIBM to memory as the CGA emulator. Everything just works past that point. The program properly detects the Hercules/mono text and Hercules/mono graphics capability of the card during activation as well. Picture is stable with no flickering or other issues going on. Going to call this resolved even if it's a kludge of a fix in my personal opinion.

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