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Western Digital VGA ISA video card, quick test

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First post, by retro games 100

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Introduction
I am testing a Western Digital VGA ISA video card. On the back of the card, there's a sticker saying: FCC ID: DHXDTLE90C31-1. I used this FCC lookup website to discover that the people responsible for this product are called Leading Edge Products Inc.

1) Link to the Windows 3.1 driver. Filename is 90c31.zip. Original source: DriverGuide.
2) Link to the Stason webpage diagram.
3) Link to the DOS utility, but see note 3 below! Filename is 90C3031D.ZIP. Original source: Mpoli files.

Notes
1) If you set the card to a certain resolution and it doesn't work, then see the information below in the section called "Using the card in Windows 3.1".

2) The switch box jumpers are incorrectly labelled on this webpage. Switches 3 and 4 are incorrectly labelled 1 and 2.

3) Oh dear, the Mpoli files website can't be accessed at the moment. I really hope this is only temporary. I haven't tested this file yet, because I can't download it. However, it's probably a VESA utility, and I've found a whole bunch of them inside one zip file, for various VGA cards, including Western Digital. It's here.

The card
wd2.JPG

Using the card in Windows 3.1
I set the resolution to 1024x768, but the refresh rate wasn't LCD friendly, and my LCD displayed an "out of range" error message. However, I consulted the Stason diagram webpage (link 2 above), and the refresh rates can be altered using the "switch box" on the right hand side of the card. I set switches 2 and 4 to off, and now I can use the card at 1024x768 @ 60Hz. Below is the simple Windows 3.x Western Digital control panel.
wdc.jpg

Questions
1) Are all Western Digital ISA VGA cards called Paradise, or only some of them?

Reply 3 of 11, by Old Thrashbarg

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Are all Western Digital ISA VGA cards called Paradise, or only some of them?

Paradise was actually a subsidiary of Western Digital, originally a separate company but WD bought it out in the '80s. The branding was a bit strange, AFAIK the Western Digital video cards were always called 'Paradise' but all the later chipsets themselves were only had a Western Digital marking on them.

The 90C31 is interesting as it was the first accelerated Paradise card.

Reply 4 of 11, by Tetrium

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retro games 100 wrote:

I'm fairly sure it's a can opener.

LMAO!
Wasn't that somekind of feature connector??

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Reply 5 of 11, by retro games 100

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Thanks a lot for the info. I ran WinTune 2.0 for Windows 3.x, and followed the Windows 3 "hyperlinks" to the 3rd image shown below. It mentions "32-bit accelerator chips". I wonder, would this very early WD accelerator not be 32-bit? The reason I ask is that I did not see an option for 24-bit color @ 640x480. I think all color and resolution options provided by the WD Windows 3.x driver were for a maximum of 256 colors only.

wd1.jpg

wd22.jpg

wd3.jpg

Reply 7 of 11, by sliderider

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retro games 100 wrote:
Tetrium wrote:
retro games 100 wrote:

I'm fairly sure it's a can opener.

LMAO!
Wasn't that somekind of feature connector??

Yep. (Wikipedia link for "feature connector")

So what practical application would it have in a system with 8-bit ISA slots? There was no 3D accelerated gaming, so that would be out. So would DVD decoding. It's clearly not a TV tuner card nor is it a TV/video capture card, so what does that leave?

Reply 8 of 11, by Tetrium

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sliderider wrote:

So what practical application would it have in a system with 8-bit ISA slots? There was no 3D accelerated gaming, so that would be out. So would DVD decoding. It's clearly not a TV tuner card nor is it a TV/video capture card, so what does that leave?

You could hook up this card with a few older TV tuner cards internally if you didn't want (or don't have) the external cabling.

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Reply 9 of 11, by Old Thrashbarg

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It mentions "32-bit accelerator chips". I wonder, would this very early WD accelerator not be 32-bit? The reason I ask is that I did not see an option for 24-bit color @ 640x480.

Huh? 32-bit refers to the memory bus. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it has any relation to the color depth, and that's certainly not what the help file says. 1MB of memory would normally allow for 640x480x24 (3 bytes per pixel, multiplied by 307200 pixels, comes out to ~921K memory required) and 800x600x16 (2 bytes per pixel, multiplied by 480000 pixels, for 960K memory), but only if the chipset and DAC support it. Your card is limited to 256 colors at all resolutions because it only has a 256 color DAC.

Reply 10 of 11, by elianda

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32 bit can also refer to the internal data bus width. It was kind of a advertising keyword in those days.

About the 1024x768 resolution: The default refresh rate for this is 43 Hz interlaced which looks not too bad on early CRTs with a slower brightness fading. A usual TFT will not work with this. This setting was introduced in 1987 with IBMs 8514A graphics adapter and was a de facto standard for all early SVGA cards supporting 1024 resolution. There are alot of early cards having the 1024 in its name infact, like this one
http://mail.lipsia.de/~enigma/neu/pics/headland_1024i.jpg
probably the i means interlaced.

60 Hz operation was a additional option of you got a better DAC, and as you already noticed had to be jumpered seperatly. (Or using a software tool like with ET4000 based boards)

The feature connector was widely used with all kinds of professional Video cards like Matrox Impression 8 series or Creative Video Blaster. It allows the external card to access the RAM of the main graphics card, like a direct framebuffer access. Usually this works only in certain modes where the video cards driver knows the memory layout in the graphics cards ram. Still it allows a lot of things like putting images into the main graphics cards ram or using a HiColor DAC from the video board for output, digital color keying a.s.o.

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