georgel wrote on 2025-12-21, 21:47:

Can the BIOS extension of this card be of use to you? I know nothing of the status of the card -- I do not have a motherboard to test it with, I made a reasearch once upon a time and concluded it could cause damage if plugged in to the PISA of ABIT AB-PB4.

looks similar to this card: https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/card … ndows-vga-local

Does the bios contain a vendor name? edit — I see the bios file now, no it doesn't offer any help.

Really looks like a gainward part number, even if the jumpers are a little different, so I'm setting that as the vendor for now.

https://theretroweb.com/expansioncards/s/gain … -cardex-9204-01

douglar wrote on 2025-12-22, 00:02:

Really looks like a gainward part number, even if the jumpers are a little different, so I'm setting that as the vendor for now.

Yeah, that yellow label with the serial number is typical of Gainward/Cardex products.

georgel wrote on 2025-12-21, 22:35:

You may upload the pictures wherever you like. Here is the BIOS extension of the pictured card.

The attachment TSENG_ET4000_OLB.zip is no longer available

Okay this is quite interesting - I have a few findings:
The BIOS provided by @georgel also claims 256KB during boot. However, @weedeewee kindly provided and uploaded to TRW the original driver floppies[1] for our cards, which among other things contain a tool, "DMODE" which allows configuring the card: Refresh rates in various modes (so I get my 60/70Hz in 1024x768!) and, importantly, memory size!

However, this tool *only* seems to work with the original VGA BIOS, so while it fixes my refresh rate issues it does not fix the font issues. When attempting to run it with @georgel's BIOS, it just blanks the screen then exits rather than provide the nice menu. But - lo and behold, it still tickles the card enough to suddenly report 1MB RAM! And after running it, despite it not seeming to *do* anything, I can load TLIVESA and run Open Cubic Player, and both text modes *and* the 1024x768 graphics modes work as expected!

So now I need to go back and test several of the other BIOSes I've been fiddling with, and see if any of them behave "even better" - but for now, this is almost a workable workaround. The only issue I see is that with e.g. OS/2 or so, it might not be able to set the modes correctly - but I'll report back once I tried (there are .. ways).

/Eirik

Short follow-up: Seems like the DMODE trick is not consistent; it does set it to 1MB but refresh rates are again interlaced .. *sigh*

...if I run DMODE, then TLIVESA, and only load EANSI.SYS or whatnot *after* that (using devload or somesuch), then it seems to work ...