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Herc CGA card not working in 8088s?

Mike Chambers

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Sep 2, 2006
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does anybody know any reason my hercules (GD200 i think) CGA card will not work in both 8088s i've tried it in? if i toss it in my 386, or any 286 it works fine. i've even taken every other card out of the machines and still no go.

does anybody know what the issue is? :confused:
 
does anybody know any reason my hercules (GD200 i think) CGA card will not work in both 8088s i've tried it in? if i toss it in my 386, or any 286 it works fine. i've even taken every other card out of the machines and still no go.

does anybody know what the issue is? :confused:

The only thing I can think of is that the slot you're plugging it into on the 8088 is bad. Try a different slot.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, I'd be willing to try it out in my hardware; PM me if interested.
 
The only thing I can think of is that the slot you're plugging it into on the 8088 is bad. Try a different slot.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, I'd be willing to try it out in my hardware; PM me if interested.

nope, i know the slots are fine. when i took out the 100% working VGA card and put the herc CGA in the same slot it doesn't work, i've tried 3 other slots as well. i may take you up on that, too. that would awesome. :p

what i really just think is weird is how it doesn't work in EITHER of the 8088's i tried it in. and again, put it on a 286 or newer and it works perfectly.
 
Have you set the motherboard switches to CGA?

wow can't believe i didn't think of that. this solved the problem, it was still set to monochrome which was the original card that was in there. after that i had a VGA in it which is why the switches didn't even cross my mind.

the VGA card has a BIOS ROM so the switches meant nothing. thanks! :mrgreen:

now i can finally try 8088 corruption on a "true" CGA card. (not exactly, it's a herc CGA but same difference basically)
 
Ah, yes, once again, more than 1 brain comes thru. That was a frequent requirement to find bad typos in my programming. You see, I KNEW what it was supposed to say, not what was actually there. My mistake of DECrementing a register instead of INCrementing it is my most famous mental lapse I can think of. The 360/50 OS had a bug in that it stored it's register restore info in YOUR address space. So, as I moved backward in my address space, clearing memory as it went, I would get a memory access exception. The OS would go to where it had stored the restore info and CRASH. I never did find my error until the card deck was totally trashed by the computer operators!! I can't blame them. About 2 hours of jobs would have to be put thru the card reader ONCE AGAIN every time my little assembler program crashed the entire thing (good ol' HASP!).
 
What we have hee-yah, is a fail-yah to communicate...

There is no such thing as a 'Herc CGA' card (I know somebody is going to correct me, since Hercules(tm) did produce CGA hardware). Hercules Graphics are not CGA, nor vice-versa.

Hercules Graphics cards = set the mainboard switches for mono.

CGA (even those which display grayscale on a mono monitor (CGA emulation)) = set the mb switches for CGA.

Clee-yah? (I'm a-gonna go drink me some bee-yah)...

/CoolHandLuke Mode

--T
 
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What we have hee-yah, is a fail-yah to communicate...

There is no such thing as a 'Herc CGA' card (I know somebody is going to correct me, since Hercules(tm) did produce CGA hardware). Hercules Graphics are not CGA, nor vice-versa.

Hercules Graphics cards = set the mainboard switches for mono.

CGA (even those which display grayscale on a mono monitor (CGA emulation)) = set the mb switches for CGA.

Clee-yah? (I'm a-gonna go drink me some bee-yah)...

/CoolHandLuke Mode

--T

well it's a CGA-compatible GD200 card made by Hercules. :)
 
Cast your mind back to 1984. Hercules made something called a "Color Card". 16K RAM, 16 color, usual CGA modes. Half-length and with a printer port.

If it's not a CGA card, it's darned close.
 
Cast your mind back to 1984. Hercules made something called a "Color Card". 16K RAM, 16 color, usual CGA modes. Half-length and with a printer port.

If it's not a CGA card, it's darned close.

It does differ from the original CGA in one useful way. It can share the B8000-B8FFF memory range with a (mono) Hercules card, disabling its own memory when the mono card is using that range.
 
It does differ from the original CGA in one useful way. It can share the B8000-B8FFF memory range with a (mono) Hercules card, disabling its own memory when the mono card is using that range.

Quite convenient, as I've discovered a number of programs that try to use B800h in Hercules mode, resulting in a screenful of garbage on both the mono and color displays.
 
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