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My newest machine

Some people I've heard from say
that they have seen a true graphical
program on a MDA being done. While
they do believe it's not possible to
easily access this, with some complex
code, it's possible. I believe the
program they saw was a Fractal
demostration, which was written in C.
Click to expand...

I suspect this was a Hercules card and not a true MDA card. Hercules made a card that was an MDA clone and included the ability to do graphics. If I remember correctly it was 768x348 graphics or something like that.

There was no BIOS interrupt to put it into graphics mode. That required accessing the cards ports to set the mode. And if you did it wrong the monitor burned up. Most people, me included, just "borrowed" some known good code to set the modes rather than risk the monitor till you got it right.

When it wasn't in graphics mode it was just like a normal MDA card.

I had one for a long time. They were kind of a de-facto standard on PC clones. I did my first PC graphics programming on one. Just some sprite graphics.

Barry
 
"Super-Slasher" wrote:

> -EDIT- Also I made a mistake: the pallette
> for the PGA card was not millions, but
> infact 4096 colors. Still might impressive at
> the time, when most color monitors and
> video cards only had a pallette of up to
> 256.

4096 colours cerainally has some significance
between machines. When the Amstrad CPC
Plus was introduced around 1990, it came out
with support for 4096, this was Amstrads way
of trying to compete with the Amiga. While
it worked well, I have no idea why it flopped,
perhaps the Amiga had become to established,
however Amstrad never marketed this CPC
Plus to Australia (not that it might of made a
difference! ;-)
As a conserquence, many of us with regular
Amstrads kept them.

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
"Barry" wrote:

> I suspect this was a Hercules card and
> not a true MDA card. Hercules made a
> card that was an MDA clone and
> included the ability to do graphics. If I
> remember correctly it was 768x348
> graphics or something like that.

I'll have to get back to you on this, however
I do know about the Hercules card & it's
graphical abilities (even though it's just
mono).

I'm pretty sure that the person I was
talking to about this certainally knows about
the Hercules card. The code they were
describing to me (while it was in C), looked
far more complicated than anything they
have ever seen & they simply couldn't
explain it to me. I'll see if I can get this
code, so that I can have a look.
Anyway, I should imagine that it wouldn't be
too difficult to do some graphics on a Herc.

> There was no BIOS interrupt to put it into
> graphics mode. That required accessing
> the cards ports to set the mode. And if
> you did it wrong the monitor burned up.

That's basically the deal when you get your
ports all messed up.

> Most people, me included, just "borrowed"
> some known good code to set the modes
> rather than risk the monitor till you got it
> right.

> When it wasn't in graphics mode it was
> just like a normal MDA card.

> I had one for a long time. They were
> kind of a de-facto standard on PC clones.
> I did my first PC graphics programming
> on one. Just some sprite graphics.

Oh well, I'll see if I can get this so-called
code for doing graphics on a MDA &
perhaps post it here, I wouldn't recommend
trying to run it on anything else though,
otherwise it may do what you said & burn
up.

Cheers,
CP/M User.
 
The XT-286 is supposed to be even faster than the AT, even though they use the same processor. The XT-286 uses zero wait-state RAM, which is what makes the difference. (Wait states kill performance.) It's a newer design the AT, and they were able to take advantage of slightly better parts to do that.
 
mbbrutman said:
The XT-286 is supposed to be even faster than the AT, even though they use the same processor. The XT-286 uses zero wait-state RAM, which is what makes the difference. (Wait states kill performance.) It's a newer design the AT, and they were able to take advantage of slightly better parts to do that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just read that the other day. The XT-286 came out in 1986. I always thought they came out at the same time as the AT, in 1984 (and that IBM just made 'em to get rid of a bunch of ol' XT cases they had layin' around).

--T
 
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