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Recommendations on ISA SVGA card?

OAK vga cards are great to keep as a back up and testing purposes if you main isa video card goes tits up.

If the OPs card had some free ram slots on his OAK vga card he may have been able to get svga out of it. Even if it was only temporary until he got a better isa video card.
 
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The OAK OTI-077 in my Tandy 1000 runs 800x600x16 under GEOS with 512K installed without a problem, so they can certainly *do* SVGA. But I'm not sure about their VESA support. There might be a helper driver for that.

... Regarding the comment about "flicker" in SVGA modes from OP's first post, that's a thing with most pre-1990-something video cards that may or may not have a solution. Long and short of it is that early VGA cards didn't have programmable clock generators so they could only support so many combinations of resolution and refresh rates. Basically here's the giveaway: if your video card has a *row* of metal can oscillators on it like this old OAK O37:

438_oak_oti037c_ab043255_top_hq.jpg


Then it's likely it supports only a very limited selection of refresh rates. If this is the OAK card they have the 35.5Mhz crystal on there is probably the pixel clock for the 800x600 mode, and that limits you to the (pretty awful and eye-killing) 800x600@56hz that was the "Ur-SVGA" mode. There's no software fix for this. And this wasn't just a problem for cheap garbage cards like the OAKs, some very expensive cards that supported a plethora of modes ended up with a positively comic number of crystal cans on them.

A newer OAK like this uses a PLL that can do semi-arbitrary divisions of the single 50MHz in the "OSC1" position, so refresh-rates are negotiable.

daf30d03da42a5291604b3fcca07f0d0_XL.jpg
 
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Far as I know there are 0 vesa vbe drivers for Trident cards till they hit VLB, so 9440x? And some here are right, if the cards 8900 or up are fully populated, and have interleave on, they arent horrid.

But OP made a fine choice getting a Tseng ET4000ax. Great video chipset. (y)
 
UniVBE is indeed a great piece of software. It's one of the first shareware MS-DOS applications that I ever registered. Too bad I can't find my original registered version.

- Alex
 
This topic has been beaten to death on VOGONS already. Lots of cards can meet your needs depending on what you want to do with it. The more advanced cards are really only useful if you need windows drivers capable of delivering something better than 640x480 or 800x600 in 256 colours with acceleration.
If you just want to play DOS games can can basically ignore those cards. The better question would be which cards should you avoid. Personally I try to stay away from anything that isn't a known brand. There are many ET4000AX cards for example that look like a blurry mess because corners were cut. This was less important in the late 80s and early 90s when people were running 14" displays with .39 dot pitch, but you might not like the results on an LCD.
There is general consensus that OAK cards are all slow. Maybe there's one that isn't crap? I'm not aware of one. There is also general consensus that Tridents were slow. From what I hear sometimes that's just because the cards were misconfigured (running in 8-bit slot mode, 8-bit BIOS mode). What I do know is that the 8900D is supposed to be pretty quick. I think it had FIFOs, but didn't use interleaved memory (interleaved memory usually only helps accelerated graphics modes too, which the 8900D doesn't support). Still, with Trident cards, the image quality might not be very good either. Cirrus logic cards shouldn't be expensive if you're not trying to get the 543x Alpine series. The 542x cards weren't exactly rare. My experience with the VLB versions was that they weren't anything special, but supposedly they really shine on ISA. I have a 5434 for ISA, and I would absolutely recommend that if you can get one cheaply. I think on VOGONS there was a project to reproduce a batch of them, but I don't know the current status, and it may not be cheap either.
 
This is not VOGONS iirc.

This subject has also been discussed here numerous times in the past before VOGONS even existed or covered older kit below Pentium 1s.

The importent thing to remember is the OP asked the question here on vcfed not VOGONS.


The OP has gotten a new svga card and I'm sure will report back on vcfed NOT VOGONS on if they a satisfied with the purchase of the new video card.

I'm sure your input on Cirrus Logic cards is well received AO here on vcfed. I'm quite found of them myself.

My 14" color vga monitor was 28dp so a 39dp would have been luxurious in comparison.
 
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Got it. You don't like VOGONS.
Then post the relevant link to the vcfed thread (if you can find it).
The reason I mentioned VOGONS is because the topic comes up frequently, and is easy to find with a search engine.
 
In fact I've made quite a few posts on VOGONS refering to your V'Ger XT AO when VOGONS members ask what they can do with an XT class computer systems.
 
After reading forums, I also went with Tseng Labs ET4000AX 10 years ago and the performance, game & software support was decent. I would certainly reccomend them, but in my case they didn't last very long. I've got 4 of them now, all mulfunctionging one reason or another. My other ISA VGA cards (one S3 928, one from OAK and 2 MXIC) are all still working. Maybe it is just coincidence.

And BTW, the ISA BUS output is usually the limiting factor with these cards. Having a 486 it is likely that your BIOS supports ISA clock adjustments. The default is 7.192 MHz, but you can safely increase it to 8, maybe even 10 MHz and this will improove VGA performance a lot. I personally even got it to 12 MHz and it almost matched VLB cards in benchmarks.
 
I've been trying to find a good ISA card that supports at least 32,768 colors in windows 3.1. I want to get a 2" Video Still Floppy drive working on a 386 but the software apparently needs hi color. I found an ET4000EX on an orchid Prodesigner IIs card with 1MB vram. I'm hoping that does the trick.
 
One thing to bear in mind when choosing an ET4000AX is that there's numerous revisions of it out there.

I recommend the any ET4000AX card with an IC of revision TC6100AF if you're looking for higher color modes; those often are on cards with true color capable RAMDACs, like the Diamond SpeedStar24.
 
I remember my TVGA9000 being a pretty lousy dog, but honestly it was probably about average. The real problem is, well, there's a reason why they invented VESA local bus around the time the 486 got popular. When you have a bus that optimistically taps out at about 8MB/s even if your VGA card can run with literally zero delay you're going to feel the drag when you get into SuperVGA resolutions. Cards like the aforementioned Cirrus Logic chip were good at covering up this problem, at least to some extent, when you were running Windows because of their acceleration features, I had one late in the 486's timeline, but I don't remember it being much different for games.

(Or to put it another way, I guess I remember it playing DOOM in the standard 320x200 mode just fine on the Trident, no complaints. But holy cow were its higher res 256 color modes draggy.)
If memory serves my last ISA card was an ET3000 series. Accelerated Windows pretty well.
By the late 90s I had a low-end (~90Mz AMD P5 equivalent) with PCI and was running a 2Mb Matrox Millennium. Very nice, quick 2d card, but limited to 800x600x256. I couldn't afford the 4Mb card at the time.
 
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