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AT&T VDC600 VGA card displays unusual palette

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raifield

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 3, 2010
Messages
174
Location
NJ, USA
I have an AT&T VDC600 VGA card in a 386 system and I can't get it to display colors properly. The card has a bank of five DIP switches, with no information on what any of them do, though I have figured that the first switch must be a mono/color switch, for my monitor displays "Out of Sync" when that one is switched Off.

The rest of them seem to have no effect whatsoever. Any games I try to load on the system that require VGA will load properly...with the exception that all the colors are wrong. Quest for Glory II, for example, is supposed to use VGA to display 16-colors, but I get four: brown, red, yellow, and blue. Lords of the Realm suffers from similar issues, only it favors magenta instead of it's normal colors. It seems that the card is communicating that it can handle VGA...then doesn't.

I don't think it is my CRT monitor, I have used it for months on a Windows 2000 machine with no issues at all, including playing the same games I'm having issues with on the 386 system.

To stop the rambling: My issue is that I can find no information on the VDC600 card at all, save for that it is really a Paradise VGA card, which is obvious as it has a large Paradise VGA chip on it. If I knew what the DIP switches did, I might be closer to figuring this out.
 
raifield said:
I have an AT&T VDC600 VGA card in a 386 system and I can't get it to display colors properly. The card has a bank of five DIP switches, with no information on what any of them do, though I have figured that the first switch must be a mono/color switch, for my monitor displays "Out of Sync" when that one is switched Off.

The rest of them seem to have no effect whatsoever. Any games I try to load on the system that require VGA will load properly...with the exception that all the colors are wrong. Quest for Glory II, for example, is supposed to use VGA to display 16-colors, but I get four: brown, red, yellow, and blue. Lords of the Realm suffers from similar issues, only it favors magenta instead of it's normal colors. It seems that the card is communicating that it can handle VGA...then doesn't.

I don't think it is my CRT monitor, I have used it for months on a Windows 2000 machine with no issues at all, including playing the same games I'm having issues with on the 386 system.

To stop the rambling: My issue is that I can find no information on the VDC600 card at all, save for that it is really a Paradise VGA card, which is obvious as it has a large Paradise VGA chip on it. If I knew what the DIP switches did, I might be closer to figuring this out.
Click to expand...

Have you found any similar cards on TULARC? http://stason.org/search.html?cx=000348145676127462126%3Alfdbdo5qnx4&cof=FORID%3A10&q=paradise+vga&sa=Search

Might be close or the same as one of the paradise VGA cards listed there...
 
Thanks, that helped a great deal, the VDC600 seems to be a PARADISE VGA PLUS 16 and I found specific drivers for it that correctly identifies the card, but...still no fix for the colors. Jill of the Jungle is just whites and blues in 256-color mode. Oddly enough, when the game fades out and quits, you can see the colors as completely correct...for an instant. Then the game quits.

Very odd, perhaps the card is damaged in some way. Oh well. ISA VGA cards are easy to replace.
 
Hello Raifield,

do you still have the computer with the VDC600 board?

May I ask you if you could take some hi-res pictures of the board and also dump on a file the ROM content?

Vincenzo.
 
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