VOGONS


First post, by incanus

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Over in this post I have a weird old VGA card with custom ribbon connector to an LCD working finally, transplanted into a modern(ish) machine but powered off of the original PSU.

The card has 8 DIP switches on it that allow you to specify (among other things) what graphics mode it runs in... I have identified CGA, EGA, MGA, VGA, and VGA protected. When running in any of the non-VGA modes, console fonts in a modern Linux or FreeBSD or in FreeDOS are just fine, with noticeable chunkiness in CGA mode, for example. But in the VGA modes, the fonts become garbled:

The attachment garbled console.jpg is no longer available

You can see things happening when you type or when output appears (as much as you can get it to when you aren't exactly sure what you're typing, anyway). So it's "live", just not displaying right.

I believe this is maybe a font or character set issue, a mismatch between old hardware VGA modes and modern framebuffer-type console displays. Does anyone know how I could debug this? I could get into a bunch of Linux and FreeBSD kernel and other boot settings I've tried, but I'll hold off on that for now.

Reply 1 of 2, by Tetrium

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I think I recently (and I mean like under a week ago) came across another thread on vogons with someone who seemed to have a very similar issue to you. Even the empty spots were filled up with ááá symbols like yours is here.
Perhaps your 2 cases are connected in some way?

EDIT: Here's the thread
ALG2228A with issues?

Whats missing in your collections?
My retro rigs (old topic)
Interesting Vogons threads (links to Vogonswiki)
Report spammers here!

Reply 2 of 2, by incanus

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Thanks for the link. I got my machine to work in standard ways with DOS & Windows as well as a single-floppy Linux from 2002 and there is no sign of this problem. So far, it's been limited to when the VGA card was in my more modern Pentium III system's ISA slot trying to run various systems.