Jackson
Experienced Member
I was planning to do my great big grand reveal of a fashionably working AT&T 6300, all with it's original pristine MFM drive, the keyboard and the original installation of MS-DOS, but nooooooo, the CRT had to bust because of a shipping issue! Leaving the machine itself aside, I just had to find a working VGA card for the special doohickey it is with it's proprietary video board. And I made sure I did not fry anything by disabling both the onboard video jumper setting, and the W1 jumper that is present on the P8 video card.
So, to cut to the chase, nothing I try to shove in it works! I've tried the VGA Wonder XL card, I've tried the Speedstar 24X with the BIOS access jumper toggled as "8-bit", I even wasted green leaves on a Paradise VGA Plus 16 just to see if flipping all the switches down (which is recommended for getting these cards to work on an IBM XT) would make video show on the damn thing.
For every card I tried, it either locks up the machine on POST with nothing to show, or for the Speedstar, it just cheeses it by having the machine working but with no video to be shown at all. And I wonder...
...do these issues have any relations to how the mainboard simulates the 8088 BIU wrong? Something about wrong data being received and sent forcing the machine to lock up? All I can feel now is anger and rage building up from the machine at this point being nothing but a dud until I get the CRT fixed. Or can it just be simply a jumper issue with ROM not being mapped in the correct spot? I can post the mainboard jumpers if any of you would like to see...
By the way: the special CRT's also a color CRT, so I really have to be careful with these things!
So, to cut to the chase, nothing I try to shove in it works! I've tried the VGA Wonder XL card, I've tried the Speedstar 24X with the BIOS access jumper toggled as "8-bit", I even wasted green leaves on a Paradise VGA Plus 16 just to see if flipping all the switches down (which is recommended for getting these cards to work on an IBM XT) would make video show on the damn thing.
For every card I tried, it either locks up the machine on POST with nothing to show, or for the Speedstar, it just cheeses it by having the machine working but with no video to be shown at all. And I wonder...
...do these issues have any relations to how the mainboard simulates the 8088 BIU wrong? Something about wrong data being received and sent forcing the machine to lock up? All I can feel now is anger and rage building up from the machine at this point being nothing but a dud until I get the CRT fixed. Or can it just be simply a jumper issue with ROM not being mapped in the correct spot? I can post the mainboard jumpers if any of you would like to see...
By the way: the special CRT's also a color CRT, so I really have to be careful with these things!