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Compaq Portable EGA card on eBay

I assume these are compatible with the built-in monitor. I'm tempted, though the listing's shipping cost of "varies" is disappointing, considering ebay offers simple tools for estimating shipping, and a small flat-rate box could easily send this. Semiotically the seller's message is "I can't be bothered, but I assure you it is great, give me your money."
 
I V20'd my CP and added a FlashFloppy Gotek, and just ordered a Texelec keyboard overhaul set, so the ol' girl is starting to show signs of life. Oh, and it came home from the thrift store with an AST six-pack and a hardcard.

EDIT: I apologize, the seller does have a shipping calculator link. The seller has good feedback. I was going to make an offer, but realized I have no idea what my ebay login might be. "Polis... something?"
 
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That same seller has a sh!t ton of MFM hard drives too. All grossly overpriced, just as the EGA cards above.

I’d be sold at $75 or less on one of the EGA cards. Would probably go in my portable II. Could be worth a try to make an offer, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. I’ve found sellers like this generally have very little wiggle room.

I suspect they mostly have the best offer option for bulk orders, if you were actually insane enough to do so, because even then, I doubt they’d knock much off.
 
That seller listed 50,000 items in a very short period of time; all have high prices with no images, but there are a number of hard to find components listed. I asked for a photograph of one component I am somewhat interested in (in spite of the high price) and received the following:

Dear Customer,
Recently we posted many vintage items that we just acquired. We know that there is great demand for these items, but unfortunately our vendor did not provide us with very many images of the parts. We understand that having photos is the key to selling vintage items, but we acquired over 50,000 parts and unfortunately are behind on posting images. We are doing all we can to post images but demand is very high and we are way behind. Please don't hesitate to send requests for images and item details and we will do out best to provide them as soon as we can. Please forgive us for the inconvenience.
Alex Kaydanov
Owner
 
They should be taking pictures before they list the items in my opinion. Would take longer, but, considering the exceedingly high prices, it’s the least they could do.

Either way, I won’t be buying anything from them unless the prices get real. And since they seem to think people are beating the doors down to get their items, I have a feeling they wouldn’t take much less either.

They are acting like there is so much demand they can’t keep up. Kinda ridiculous if you ask me. At the prices they are asking, I imagine they have sold very little of what they have listed so far.
 
Yeah id love one but not for that price. And i joined ebay 20 years ago. There is no excuse to have a listing with no photo today. Dont know about you guys but i would never bid or buy somthing sight unseen.
 
VERAULT said:
Yeah id love one but not for that price. And i joined ebay 20 years ago. There is no excuse to have a listing with no photo today. Dont know about you guys but i would never bid or buy somthing sight unseen.
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Well the one I linked to has photos if that helps. He seems to have decent feedback too. Hopefully it works out, it’s still a lot of money for an EGA card, but it would be cool to play some EGA games on the portable.

Does anyone know if the Deskpro monitor will work with this card too? I still haven’t repaired mine deskpro. I guess I should get on that so that I can try it out.
 
jafir said:
Well the one I linked to has photos if that helps. He seems to have decent feedback too. Hopefully it works out, it’s still a lot of money for an EGA card, but it would be cool to play some EGA games on the portable.

Does anyone know if the Deskpro monitor will work with this card too? I still haven’t repaired mine deskpro. I guess I should get on that so that I can try it out.
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With a 286 accelerator or portable II, Windows 3.0 looks really sharp on that 9 inch screen. As for the Compaq dual mode monitor, it should work. Follow the link I posted earlier to make sure you get the right switch settings. Timings are slightly different for the dual-mode monitor than an EGA monitor.
 
Received the EGA card from eBay today. Works fine, though it was just wrapped in bubble wrap, not in an ESD bag.

I used the DIP switch settings linked in the forum post above, set SW2 switches 1-2 to on, 3 to off, and it works well. Had to re-run the setup disk to change the video adapter in CMOS, then it worked fine. Passed all of the diagnostics on disk 2 of the setup/inspect/diagnostic set (360k floppies.)

Now to get Minix or maybe Xenix running on it... though I might want to see about connecting a Gotek to it if I'm going to do that.
 
HoJoPo said:
Received the EGA card from eBay today. Works fine, though it was just wrapped in bubble wrap, not in an ESD bag.

I used the DIP switch settings linked in the forum post above, set SW2 switches 1-2 to on, 3 to off, and it works well. Had to re-run the setup disk to change the video adapter in CMOS, then it worked fine. Passed all of the diagnostics on disk 2 of the setup/inspect/diagnostic set (360k floppies.)

Now to get Minix or maybe Xenix running on it... though I might want to see about connecting a Gotek to it if I'm going to do that.
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Glad to hear you got it working. I'm not sure Minix or Xenix will do much to show off your new graphical prowess, however.
 
resman said:
Glad to hear you got it working. I'm not sure Minix or Xenix will do much to show off your new graphical prowess, however.
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True, I already have games loaded, and EGA graphics are working fine. Since the internal drive failed, I used a CF card in an adapter on the stock IDE controller, one of those that mounts in a slot. So I can easily change CF cards to play with different operating systems. Heck, might try loading OS/2 1.X just to be weird... since mine is a Portable II.
 
HoJoPo said:
True, I already have games loaded, and EGA graphics are working fine. Since the internal drive failed, I used a CF card in an adapter on the stock IDE controller, one of those that mounts in a slot. So I can easily change CF cards to play with different operating systems. Heck, might try loading OS/2 1.X just to be weird... since mine is a Portable II.
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Have you tried Covoids (EGA capable)? http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?74390-Covoids!

Is Computer Corps staffed again? Last time I was there they really cut back on the older hardware.
 
resman said:
Have you tried Covoids (EGA capable)? http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthread.php?74390-Covoids!

Is Computer Corps staffed again? Last time I was there they really cut back on the older hardware.
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ComputerCorps is still going, we moved over next to the post office at 4630 highway 50 east in Carson City a year ago. That's where I bought the Portable II a couple months ago. We have some Apple IIgs systems, a Commodore 64 breadbin and 1541-II drive, along with a VIC-1541 and a PET 8050 dual drive on hand at the moment (not up in the retail store though), and have more in storage at the warehouse. If there's something specific you're looking for, we might have it.

We had to move from the Mallory location as the company that bought the building expanded into our old space. We just sold a Blueberry iMac G3 system a couple weeks ago.
 
I'm jealous of you all on the western side of the country. It says I won't get mine until Friday, and it's in Nebraska right now, so I'm not going to hold my breath.
 
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