The Search for ATi's Color Emulation Card

[Andrettigto]

On that “ATi Wonder Series” database site I see no mention of the CGA Wonder. I think was released before the Graphics Solution cards.

 

[Andrettigto]

…sorry, I’m having a brain fart and creating make believe hardware!
:/

 

[olidlavoie]

@olidlavoie Can you preserve the BIOS as soon as you can? It's a nice find.

Sure thing, here you go! It is written on a TI 2764 eprom chip

 

[Eudimorphodon]

@olidlavoie Can you preserve the BIOS as soon as you can? It's a nice find.

FWIW, I'm pretty sure that a pre-EGA ATI card isn't going to have any "BIOS" on it. The EPROM on that "Color Emulation Card" is almost certainly just the character generator ROM.

 

[Jackson]

I looked blindfolded.

Anyways, thanks for the EPROM dump! Nice to have a significant piece of ATi history.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

In case you're curious what the contents of that ROM are, here it is rendered with a little python toy I wrote to interpret character generator dumps. It's your standard 8K set of thin and fat CGA fonts (2K each) and a two-byte (4k) MDA/Hercules font.

 

[dhau]

8x8 CGA thick and thin and 14x9 MDA fonts

 

[Jackson]

The font set seems to be the same as the Small Wonder cards.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I was going to ask what made this different from an ATI Graphics Solution, because it has the same video ASIC on it, but looking at the picture of the board I see it only has half the RAM of a Graphics Solution. (There are 4x16Kx4bit memory chips on this for 32Kbytes; a Graphics Solution or Small Wonder has 64Kbytes.) So what video modes does this support? A full Hercules card should have 64K, so does it only support CGA and Plantronics modes?