uxwbill,
Thanks for that info. Exactly what I was looking for. I've never owned a PS/2 system and have absolutely no experience w/ MCA. However, its on my short "want list" (along w/ a NeXT) of vintage systems. So I watch fleabay hoping for a reasonably priced system and try and do my due diligence trying to learn about whats out there in terms of options/addons/etc. An Image Adapter NOS came up a few days ago. I passed it up since I wasn't sure it would be useful later...
I'm glad that this information is what you were looking for. Were it me, I'd seek out an
XGA-2 graphics adapter. The XGA-2 has good to excellent driver support across a wide variety of operating systems and is basically freely programmable to any display resolution or refresh rate that its video RAM (1MB) or RAMDAC (90MHz clock) can support. XGA-2 adapters are also relatively common and work in all of the desktop PS/2 machines that shipped with a 386SX or better CPU. Some of the XGA-2 RAMDACs are unstable if pushed to their maximum and show some misbehavior in the form of "snow" or slight misdrawing.
You should be able to find an XGA-2 card for $5-30 depending upon your luck.
There is a very nice
rewritten driver known as XGA-206 or 208 for Windows 9x and NT4 users that really pushes the card a lot further and adds capabilities that Microsoft never provided with their XGA-2 driver. (Microsoft's XGA-2 driver on Win9x is really just an XGA-1 driver.) True color modes are not yet available with the NT driver. I don't know if there will ever be more development on it or not.
I tested an unofficial release of the enhanced XGA-206/208 driver that made it possible to run 800x600 at high color on an XGA-1 adapter with its video memory upgraded to 1MB. I believe I may have been the only person in the world to do so with the XGA-1 hardware. :D
There is also the ATI
Graphics Ultra Pro card for Microchannel. While it has more video RAM and can manage high color at 1024x768, I have a hard time recommending it. It's expensive, some revisions are unstable, it runs hot, can be fiddly to set up in some machines, and the XGA-2 will blow it out of the water performance-wise. I have one, and as I'm sure you can tell, I'm just not that crazy about it.
By the way, the most current version of the Ardent Tools of Capitalism web site can be found
here.
The Image Adapter/A was a pretty capable card, it's just unfortunate that the drivers weren't a little better and available for more operating systems. It also supported the connection of an IBM 3119 (or was that 3117?) scanner or a 4126-020 laser page printer. There is also the similarly named Image
-I Adapter/A.