Quadko
Member
I didn't turn up anything with Google, but have you heard of anything to connect a CGA or EGA monitor to a windows box as an additional monitor? I'm mostly thinking about use in DosBox, honestly, but there could be other fun, too.
On the "simpler" end, maybe a driver/hack in dosbox could send the video output to the board to display, and windows doesn't recognize the board as anything special. On the "not simple" end, possibly windows recognizes it as a normal (usb) video card, and the driver or the hardware converts the input image (hopefully something like 320x200x32bpp) to the appropriate palette (320x200x4bpp!). It doesn't have to be USB, of course, I am just assuming that was simplest.
But there are lots of problems even if that all worked, especially managing or selecting video modes. Worst case it could be done manually with buttons on the device, but to get seamless emulation behavior the emulator would probably have to know to talk to the device for mode and video port calls. Or would it be simpler if the device was just a bridge between a USB memory buffer and a real ISA CGA/EGA card? Or is that much, much harder a project!
Ah well, aside from being fun to hook up an IBM CGA monitor to Windows 8, it's really the aspect ration and non-square pixels that are driving me nuts playing games on modern LCDs and that got me thinking. I was surprised there wasn't a set of discussions that turned up on a few google searches. Probably just a diverting pipe dream, but it was fun to think about! Or am I missing a project out there that would be fun to follow up with?
On the "simpler" end, maybe a driver/hack in dosbox could send the video output to the board to display, and windows doesn't recognize the board as anything special. On the "not simple" end, possibly windows recognizes it as a normal (usb) video card, and the driver or the hardware converts the input image (hopefully something like 320x200x32bpp) to the appropriate palette (320x200x4bpp!). It doesn't have to be USB, of course, I am just assuming that was simplest.
But there are lots of problems even if that all worked, especially managing or selecting video modes. Worst case it could be done manually with buttons on the device, but to get seamless emulation behavior the emulator would probably have to know to talk to the device for mode and video port calls. Or would it be simpler if the device was just a bridge between a USB memory buffer and a real ISA CGA/EGA card? Or is that much, much harder a project!
Ah well, aside from being fun to hook up an IBM CGA monitor to Windows 8, it's really the aspect ration and non-square pixels that are driving me nuts playing games on modern LCDs and that got me thinking. I was surprised there wasn't a set of discussions that turned up on a few google searches. Probably just a diverting pipe dream, but it was fun to think about! Or am I missing a project out there that would be fun to follow up with?