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Quadram Quadcolor II software & docs wanted

DeathAdderSF

DeathAdderSF

Experienced Member
Joined
Jul 2, 2016
Messages
316
Location
USA
Hello, all.

So I recently picked up a Quadram Quadcolor I CGA graphics card AND its expansion daughterboard, the Quadcolor II.
The Quadcolor II adds a special 136-color mode -- BUT!! -- that mode is only accessible after a driver has been loaded (usually via AUTOEXEC.BAT).
There's also "BASICQ," a special version of BASIC that allows for convenient programming of the Quadcolor II's graphic mode.
Either or both of these pieces of software, and/or scans of the Quadcolor II documentation, would all be very helpful.
If you have any to share, please get in touch. Thanks!

s-l1600.jpg
 
DeathAdderSF was unsuccessful in finding more information, so I'm now the keeper of the Quadram Quadcolor I+II. The request still stands -- if anyone has any disks, software, or documentation, it would be greatly appreciated.

Some independent research shows that QC1 has 32K and could have two graphics pages instead of 1. The QC2 is a daughterboard that bumps the total VRAM up to 96K, and allows for hardware-automated pageflipping between two 320x200 16-color pages, giving you 136 colors (the number of unique combinations in 16*16). Their advertising also mentions this: https://books.google.com/books?id=6...KjAA#v=onepage&q=quadram quadcolor II&f=false

I was able to find that Dr. Halo II supports the Quadcolor II, but may require the driver/software that came with the board.
 
Hello,

I'm ready to make your day! I hope at least. My wife and I are lucky enough to only be about 1.5 hours away from Computer Reset in Dallas, TX, and I was going through some of the stuff we picked up and I found a QuadColor I + QuadColor II in the box, with disk and docs! The card seems to work great in my test 5160, although I haven't tried any of the extended modes. I was looking for some info on this card online, and I found this post so I thought I would help. You will likely want the QuadColor II manual, as it has the Basic commands which are added to basica.com. I'm guessing this is for DOS 2.0? Not sure, but I haven't tested it. IMG_2744.jpgIMG_2743.jpg

The good news is that there seems to only be two files on the disk. Install.com and qci.std. I believe qci.std is renamed to gci.com and the "patch" for basica.com is contained within install.com. (The manual mentions that is patches basica and that qci.com must be loaded in the autoexec. I guess its a driver?) I was able to copy the files from the disk, but my attempts to image the disk failed and caused the disk controller to wig out, requiring a hard power-off. I've seen this happen with image disk before when it can't decipher the disk format. I believe its formatted 180k, but I really don't know if there are more files hidden in there somewhere. The disk was in the heat for years, so it's possible it just has enough bad spots to make the image fail. Not sure, but I doubt they did anything crafty like hide files on the disk, etc, so hopefully this is the right stuff for the QuadColor II. I have a known good drive too, I use it solely for archiving.

Here is a link to the files: https://1drv.ms/u/s!AmcacT3aSixdgWQygTm1VYvplXY_

My wife is working on scanning the QuadColor II manual now. Hopefully, we'll have it done pretty soon.

I know some of the Computer Reset Folks are working to archive rare drives such as these, so I will make sure to get the files to the proper authorities. :)

If you can point me to Dr. Halo II, I'd love to play around with this card myself. Oddly, my card does not match the pics of the card on the box, it's much bigger. Just curious which one you have.


Take care,
-Kevin
TexElec.com
 
Bless you!! I've mirrored your file on ftp.oldskool.org in /pub/drivers but if you can make the finished manual available too, that would really help me out as I'm hoping the technical details for programming the card are in there (man cannot live by BASIC alone). Thanks so much!
 
Yeah, I'm not sure how deep it goes. I suspect you'll be debugging the driver/patched basic to get much out of it. I only looked through the manual briefly, but it seems to just really cover the extended basic commands and isn't overly technical. Hey, can you point me to Dr. Halo II? I wanted to see if I could get it to work with the card.
 
The manuals have full programming info, thanks again!! It's spread across both manuals, but the relevant info is there: The memory is 32K starting at b800, a special port at 3DDh controls extra features, the extra 64K on the Quadcolor II is located at D000, etc. This is great, thanks so much.
 
These days you would never know that such technology ever came out of Norcross, Georgia.

Say, Modem 7, what tool did you use to OCR those PDFs as-is?
 
Last edited:
SomeGuy said:
Say, Modem 7, what tool did you use to OCR those PDFs as-is?
Click to expand...
Adobe Acrobat 9

I open the PDF, then select [Document] then [OCR Text recognition] then [Recognize text using OCR]. At that point, before actual OCR'ing, I can optionally change the OCR settings.

The 'PDF output Style' is a setting that I sometimes need to change:

Normally, I set the 'PDF output Style' setting to 'Searchable Image' so that each PDF page, as required, gets de-skewed before it is OCR'ed.

But there are times where I have to set it to 'Searchable Image (Exact)', sometimes for the whole document, or sometimes for just a page or few.
That results in no de-skewing, required because:
* Something on a page confuses or misleads the de-skewing code.
* Each PDF page is a scan of two document pages, and the two document pages are skewed relative to each other.
 
I tried OCR as well but it didn't make the document searchable and added 2MB in size after I had already run optimization. I should have a tried a bit longer, maybe I would have seen that there were PDF output settings. Thanks for posting these details modem7! :) I'll be sure to look at these settings next time around.
 
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