A new ISA graphics card for less than $5!
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- Review of a new 8-bit ISA monochrome graphics card for vintage PCs, originally available for $4.95 from Alltronics. Sorry, it's now sold out, but they have many other vintage PC and electronic items: anatekinstrume...
Well now, ain't that _somethin._ Ordered one myself, along with a couple controller cards. Thanks for sharing, sir!
EDIT: they canceled my order, dang it
LGR? In *my* VWestlife? It's more likely than you think.
...hi.
Hey nice to see you here :)
now who didn't? after this post they got flooded with orders like it was black Friday :D even if they changed the price to higher
They canceled mine too. I told them their system said there were 19 available when I placed my order and I thought that was underhanded. Their response was that they sell stuff from their inventory on multiple channels. Kinda poor customer service if you ask me. It would've been really nice to have one of these cards for my 5150.
gayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy
Not everyone can get away with whipping out The Wang 3 minutes in to a video and stay monetized. Bravo! :D My birthday 2020 comment!
Happy birthday man!
Shoulda gone here to get gis Wang Wet! ;-) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetwang . Over here in Yorkshire, England we sometimes say, “Wang it over here!” meaning to throw. Here's a few more Yorkshire sayings imfromyorkshire.uk.com/yorkshire-sayings/
@@Halterung01 Thank you, my friend! I hope you're well!
@@EgoShredder You guys also use "Not a sausage" in regular conversation. Most impressive!
Cosmo the speedrunner probably can. He just threatens to shoot up UA-cam HQ if he gets banned or demonetized and the problem is solved.
I just got this card, a display miser, an ISA IO controller, and a project box from this site. Thanks for giving me a new way to feed my addiction lol
Still have our first XT clone with its original ISA Hercules monochrome card in the attic.. still remember using a tool called HGCIBM to enable CGA emulation for games :)
Thanks for the nice throwback!!
There's also SIMCGA
Didn't see a Herc clone card until a friend got a 286 system. I still had a turbo XT back then. Had EGA though, so that wasn't too bad.
Back in the 90s, the company I worked for used SoftICE to help with debugging our hardware under Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. Soft Ice had an option to use a secondary Monochrome/MGA/Hercules card for the debugging output (stack trace, memory display, CPU registers, etc) while the software you were debugging continued to run on the VGA display. It was super useful!
SoftIce was still useful even up to Windows XP. You could actually break Windows itself and step through the code. I guess Microsoft didn't really approve of its low-level access (especially with Microsoft's support of TPM modules ¬_¬).
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z understood. :) We were working on device drivers that interfered with the SoftIce copy protection dongle, so we had to run the system without it... so the first thing we needed to do when starting up the system was to step through softice itself to skip their copy protection check... ;D we used their device to outsmart their device. :D
@@user-vn7ce5ig1z I remember there also being a program called WinICE, what was the difference? Was it just SoftIce with a windows front-end?
@@FlyingDutchman19801 I believe WinICE was just a component of SoftICE. But many A/V checkers used both names in reference to SoftICE (perhaps just by misunderstanding on their part).
SoftIce was the bomb back in the day. I think prior to that I used something called "periscope" and it was a ISA debugging card. I reverse-engineered many of my Sierra games with SoftIce :)
Congrats! The Monochrome CRT monitor actually works :) I love the long afterglow on the phosphor layer. There is something incredibly beautiful about green and black terminal screens. The first Monochrome PC monitor i ever worked with was a Commodore IBM compatible DOS PC with a yellow and black monochrome screen.
The amber black monochrome is just absolutely gorgeous but the green is a claddic for sure
@@cheeriosaregood920 Oh yeah, i miss that amber-black CRT Screen nowdays....
I´ll bet they wonder why so many people order a serial/parallel port card now... ^^
They must've found out because they updated the website and upped the price to $9
All these D-shell connectors look the same to the untrained eye.
@@centauri0 OK, that was something we could expect... But to be fair, 9$ is still a good deal for a NIB MGA card.
You are amazing! There are a few games, which I played on my dad's first computer when I was still in kindergarden. I thought I had sought out most of them... but Space War was one I had forgotten about until I just saw this video. It is an amazing feeling to be suddenly taken back like that. Thank you!
I didn't know that I made IBM compatibles back in the day!
Out of curiosity though, I went searching on a few Taiwanese auction sites, and sure enough I found quite a few people selling bundles of these very generic looking ISA monochrome graphics cards, all with the same MGP port configuration. Couldn't find one with the exact same PCB layout though. I bet the graphics chip was a reverse engineered chip that the chip fabs in Hsinchu were churning out in the late 80s and early 90s.
I had a "clone" ISA Hercules card and the biggest chip on the board was made by Hitachi. I bet I still have that card somewhere, I don't recall throwing it out...
My mom used a Wang computer back in the late 1980's, early 1990's when doing database entries for Hartford Insurance back then and the monitor had different colors to choose from for the MDA graphics and she chose purple as it was better for the eyes.
@@RetroPCUser You meant the CGA i.e. Color/Graphics adapter (note the slash, you essentially could use either one but not both at the same time)?
MDA had no colors, or it has back, green (depending on the monitor) and high intensity.
Wang was pretty big in the word processor market as well as creating their own line of computers before they dove into the IBM-compatible market as sort of a hail mary to survive in the market. Wang very much went for the boring corporate look and they even somewhat outdid IBM in terms of looking like 1970s computers well into the 1980s.
@@NozomuYume I had a (very dead) Wang OIS-50 in my storage shed for a time (but no terminal, even if it was working. I had been planning to do a "case-mod" with it, but then I figured it would be too hard to do. Seeing the case mods people do now, that one would have been a cinch.
Three times faster with the WANG! Great sponsor
That's usually my problem.
That Wang PC reminded me: wasn't there a video where at the end you showed off a Wang brand keyboard with the humourous phrase of "By the way, I'd like to show you my Wang." Do you remember which video that was?
Who knew computers and their ads could be sexy(SCSI)?
Borland took those text user interfaces to a new level with their IDEs for C / Pascal etc. Fond memories of college Pascal hackery!
I spent many hours typing into Turbo Pascal 6 for DOS on my 90s PC. Back then an 80x25 display on a 14” CRT didn’t seem that cramped either.
Oh yes, my high school computer class ran Turbo Pascal 6 on IBM PS/2 Model 25's, and I've loved those IBM keyboards ever since!
Those interfaces were built using a library that they included with both Pascal and C, called Turbo Vision. From time to time I come across with other Turbo Vision-based projects.
*enters today's date*
Computer: My god, l survived Y2K!
~sniff~ You've hit us right in the feels remembering the 'green-screen' monitor we'd found at 'Curby's' and used for our Commodore 128 back in the '90s. Had rigged a toggle switch it so it go from the High and Low-res feeds of the comm-ptar... Good times...
I whould love it if you did a video of your old computer collection. ( it whould have to be multiple videos probably. ) because you probably have so much that we have not seen and since many of your computer videos are rather old,the collection has proboly changed a lot.
Those startup sounds....takes me back....
That green phosphor is just gorgeous. I had an amber monochrome monitor when I was growing up, but the green ones always looked more vibrant for me. That said, I think I'd prefer an amber phosphor for prolonged use.
I really enjoyed the part where you talked about how the showdow on the monitor looks like a moon. That was really cool and nice to hear.
Yeah that Spacewars game looks AMAZING on the monochrome monitor given the high-resolution and long persistence!
I could already HEAR it start and boot up in my mind before you hit that switch! Oh man, good memories :-) I used to have these machines. Slept next to them even. I miss the sound of MFM drives...
That old HD sound...sometimes I miss it....
I wish I had a vintage Wang. I’d bring it out frequently and bang out some work now and then for fun.
A lot of dejavu or nostalgia or something watching this.. I definitely remember the 'do you want to use a joystick' prompt but none of the games you tried lol... AWESOME VIDEO :)
Jeez that brings me back. My first PC as a 10 year old was an 8088 with a 40mb MFM hard drive. The sound of that thing winding up and waiting a good 10 minutes for post. Good times.
I remember playing Space War a lot, but it isn't something I've thought about in forever. I have many more memories of the Star Control series.
When the title screen from the Spectrum Holobyte version of Tetris started loading, I heard the title music from v1.0 (Mac version) in my head. The photos used were mostly the same between the IBM/Mac versions, but in a different order. (Level 9 was the Cosmonaut Space Station and at 7.888 MHz, those pieces were FAST!)
Parking hard drive heads... That takes me back!
Those original ISA cards were something
The original ones had the irq and addresses set, no dip switches or jumpers
Then the cards had jumpers to set the addresses and irqs.
Then the software controlled settings
Some cards had programs that were specific for the card that would set the addresses and irqs and they would stay set at those settings no matter if you remove the card
Other cards had the ability to be detected by the BIOS and set through the bios
I used to need the hardware defined isa serial cards or on motherboard serial ports to program Motorola and RCI and other two-way radios that had DOS RSS that needed the serial ports that were hardware defined.
I also remember many times that I was not able to use software because it only could be set for irq 3 or 4, serial ports and it could not see port 3 or 4
Limitations that were in a lot of the software back in the day
And you would think they would learn not to put those limitations in software but in server 2000 which the internet had been around for a solid 10 years when this software came out and they still set the highest IP addresses that you could create policies for at 199.199.199.199
Back then the highest IP addresses I believe were maxed out around 150
I remember internal switches had 168 through 174 addresses
And retail routers had 192 addresses
There was nothing above 192 and the bulk of the internet infrastructure made up of the phone company equipment and the tech companies were all down below 10
I think I remember one of the government servers had a 12 address and another had a 14
As the cable companies started doing internet they were in the 20s
I don't remember how the 10 internal IP assignment came about
I'm guessing it was in the early days and the colleges and governments used that assignment for all of their internal networks
I remember one of the early programs that was like PC anywhere that allowed remote access and control over servers when I first used it to access the servers I was working on there was a scan feature that would scan whatever range you told it to scan and report back any servers it found and I remember finding another server that I had not known existed that was on our Network and I still don't know what that was to this day
One of the other really cool software programs that I had back in the day somehow would basically listen to the internet connection and I don't know if it was specifically just the node that I was connected to which had about 500 computers hooked to it or if it was the entire network which would have had 150,000 computers hooked to it. But it would display the packets going across the network over the internet and I could see the addresses and the headers and the packets data
It was really something to see
I remember the software cost $20,000 and that was 1990s
It was a diagnostic software package that was designed for finding problems in the network
I remember the packaging had a bunch of documents that specifically said using the software on any network that was not yours or that you were not authorized to use it on was a crime
Even back then they had pretty strict laws
But back then you could take an unregistered modem and connect it to a cable network and be able to see all the data going across the network
Nowadays the modems don't allow that
I wish there was a current aftermarket for this stuff. I mean, we have Raspberry Pi, and other hobby electronics. IBM stuff is open architecture. For those that would like to keep these machines running, it would be nice to be able restore the functionality that they used to have, since peripherals are getting hard to find. A flash card reader, that appears like a drive controller could be handy for someone that doesn't want to run cables or find a power plug. It's just a combination of technologies that are already out there. Fast video controllers & EISA stuff might be nice, too.
Always have been a fan, great video once agian!
Awesome. I had all these games for my parent's XT after discovering BBSs, only our monochrome monitor was amber.
This is good. Looking at your retro tech purchases in front of your retro gear made me think that if this video wasn't shot in 16:9 ratio, with high resolution and clear audio it would be hard to tell what year this was made. Modern high definition is what you want for showing such detail but I would definitely be entertained if you went through the trouble of acquiring video recording equipment from the late 80s and finding a way to get the resulting footage on UA-cam. (As long as we don't miss out on any detail.)
12:05 It's neat to see the whole character set since it reminds me of MegaZeux's alternative DOS character set. No, I don't use that set, I prefer custom characters...other than the three "gradient" ones on the third row from the bottom here.
Re the game speed: A limiting factor was the speed of the graphics RAM access.
But, since you have RAM on a card, that original system is probably doing the same for all memory access. It takes several bus cycles (at 4.77 MHz) to access one byte. I could not find a statement of just how many when I searched the web now, but I do recall that the later ISA bus would use a different protocol with fewer cycles; reading/writing a 16-bit value took one bus cycle less than transferring an 8-bit value!
BTW, what you have there is not an ISA card, but a 8-bit PC/XT card. What (even later) became known as ISA was the 16-bit version.
Blockout looks like the game Welltris (By Spectrum Holobyte) that I used to have.
15:55 That’s a good “nyet.” Solid 7/10.
A fun fact is that the original Tetris was implemented in text mode.
22:22 - "Sooo, Peter. I see you're working on a spreadsheet there - that's great… Uh, but it looks like you misspelled 'New York' - why don'tcha go ahead and fix that right now?"
Can you play games in text-only mode?
Of course you can, have you seen what bored teenagers have managed to do with the TI-84 :p
"The most exciting technological breakthrough since CD is." I can't help it, "CD's" just makes my eye twitch. Surprised no one else has mentioned it yet.
Wow, SpaceWar is so smooth and high res! We had exactly this monitor and Hercules card, but I don't think we had any games using its features. I remember using 'MG' (multi graph?) to get CGA compatibility, which sometimes worked. Some games using the 'not ugly' CGA color pallete tended to be hard to get running. In hindsight I wonder if such CGA 'emulators' caused any slow down on what was already a slow 4.77mhz system!
Imagine a sudden power outage while working on a long report. At least you have a few minutes to write down one page with pen and paper..
I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for introducing me to yet another destination for Spats and I to send our money to xD
And I thought the 3080 GPUs were long :O
These vintage machines are amazing
I should have a CT3900 somewhere, it's a soundcard, 35cm long... back when i used it, enclosures used to have a piece in the front where you'd clip in the overhang of the maximum-length card. This piece could frequently also optionally house an 80mm intake fan. Just a piece of plastic with slots in it at the very front of the enclosure which widen a little towards the open side and you'd just slide the card in there to help prevent sagging. I'm kind of puzzled that today's computers have no standard anti sag solution any longer, given how much heavier cards have become!
It is possible to use HGC an d CGA at the same time if the software is written to allow that. HGC has three modes Diag, Half and Full. Diag is totally compatible* with MDA. There is only 4 KB memory. The card boots in it. Half uses 32 kB and one graphics page. It is compatible with CGA. Full supports two graphics pages and uses 64 kB. It is not compatible with CGA. The problem is that I think many (most?) software simply put the card in full mode whether they used both pages. If one sticks just to text mode programs in the Hercules there is no problem.
Hercules actually made a special CGA card. It detected when the software put the HGC in the full mode and disabled itself.
I find interesting that IBM has the double monitor support form the beginning. Some ideas that look new can be rather old.
* meaning "works in the same way", not "can be used at the same time" like the latter use of the word.
3:00 I’ve been waiting for years for WANG to enter the automobile market, but sadly the WANG CAR never materialised…
Pretty sure Poke Man was the same or very like my first disk of DOS games my dad had on our first XT PC.
My first PC DOS games were a bootable disk that booted straight into a bunch of text mode games.
We had an amber monochrome monitor and then a green one on the AT.
Very cool monitor power off effect
WOW I remember the old computer with green screen. Were your eyes bugged out when you were done?
Do a teardown of the HD audio thing and the Monitor Power saver
Arkanoid 2 has a great hercules mode.
Thats a nice Wang.
Lol at the boss kety, but this keyboard can be heard from the other side of the office .... it doesnt sound like Lotus 123 to me LOL
HAHA! I remember playing those games as a kid and accidently hitting some random button and C code and what looked like the Turbo-C compiler would pop up. I thought it was just the code for the game or something. But in reality, it was the "Boss Key" of the game that I accidentally pressed! I never knew that! I always wondered what that was about.
There was one game -- probably one of the old _Space Quest_ games but IDR -- that had a "boss key" that would rat on you instead and proudly display your playtime for your boss.
Man, That's an old WANG.
I frequent their site all the time. 👍
thank you so much for that ad
14:11 you should've used the CompUSA serial mouse you showed off a year or so ago!
All electronics for sure
That's it, I'm getting the Wang advnced PC :p
I love the demo recall using works on a compaq lte 286 laptop. In many respects the Hecules graphics cards were a better experience back in the day, I played Karateka on a system like the one you were using. although I used floppies not a hard drive. I loved lotis 123 the nice thing about today is the software is easier to get a hold of.
Finally a card i can buy
Anything to have a working display out for my 386.
While a great find itself, it really doesn't make me all too confident about buying anything else at that same store.
I mean what else do they have that's completely mislabeled?
To be fair, like I showed, the box gives six possible choices of what's inside it, and none are checked off, so they probably just took a quick glance at it and thought it was a serial/parallel card.
There has to be a few bosses who know about the boss key
Damn. I was really hoping this was an ISA VGA card. I'm looking for a fairly simple one to reverse engineer.
UA-cam: Oh look at this great product our algorithm says he'll be interested in. Lets show it to him but wait five days just to make sure they're sold out 😂
I've got a IBM 5160 I think i need one of these cards!
yeah I think this was a very limited supply 19 in stock was probably a guesstimate
Dang, those went fast.
😀😀😀😀😀 Thank you.
I gotta get me one of those WANGs
Ah! Memories.
Heh, when I wrote a Tetris clone, I originally did it in text mode. I later re-wrote it for graphics.
...does it tun crysis?
Wish I could get one
does manchester offer PCBs, condensed books as audio or online training courses?
_Almost_ skipped the Wang ad 😅
.Poke man, yeah I used to play that game.
And blockout. Ran better on my 12 Mhz 286, with Hercules. Memories.....
What about that HDA Sound of the Future thingy video?
Eventually.
@@vwestlife cool!
I'm surprised that this monitor has such a slow refresh rate. I know, it's old, but still
It's got Powerful Memory!
This is great but will it work with Windows 10?
Have EGA card?
Can you tell me whare to order PCI GPU ?
I just want to know do they have those cassette shells. I am interested to buy them if you have the like can you send it.
This is my only option now since the RTX 3060 is out of stock smh
accursed farms Ross did a review of Nyet 3
Why wasn't there bright reversed text? Or bright reversed blinking text? Or bright reversed underlined text? Or bright blinking reversed underlined text? I'm serious, I really do want to know.
Yes, you can get bright reverse video text if you turn off blinking, just like with CGA.
Perhaps watch some videos about ESD? You left no bare contact on the card untouched.
I've never had any problems with vintage computer equipment being damaged by ESD. The only ISA card I ever fried was due to accidentally plugging it into the slot backwards.
Did you know of this recent upgrade to blockout that generalizes it to non-euclidean geometry? You can find it at zenorogue dot itch dot io slash bringris. Have fun!
The WANG is good.....
His WANG looks pretty nice, I wouldn't mind having a WANG myself
Well I like the new sponsor!
so you like the Wang?
fancy seeing you here, didn't expect that
@@Bewefau The reality is, we all like the Wang. It's just that not all of us are willing to acknowledge that fact.
@@sawyerbass4661 lol :D
My Wang really is 2-3x faster...
They didn't mention that model of Wang has an absolutely horrendous keyboard xD .
CHYROSRAN! IT'S YOU!
@@ilovespamspamisgreat6442 It'sa me!
But it has blinkenlights that illuminate to show you the status of the power-on self test!
@@vwestlife I think all wangs should come with blinkenlights. It's already a show, may as well up the production value.
Lol you are here!
Since everyone else is making Wang jokes...
Q: what do you get when you cross a Bell telecommunications satellite with a word processor?
A: a six-ton Wang that wants to reach out & touch someone.
and people complain how a gtx 3090 is huge
Right? And this bad boy here doesn't even have a massive Coolingfan and heatpipe :P
I had an ISA sound card that long once.
@@jamiemarchant I have a long sound card. An Aztech Sound Galaxy NX Pro 16 and can be longer with a SCSI or Sony CD-ROM expansion adapter installed, which are hard to find, but will be cool as a collector's item or useful.
Seems like 340*120mm (rounded to the nearest 5mm) is the maximum size for an ISA card. Big, but at least it only takes up one slot. No huge, thick heatsinks.
Boss walks in. "Steve, you don't need to be wasting your time on that particular spreadsheet. Ned down the hall is already working on it. Told me he'd be done by noon!"
I wonder how often those keys actually fooled people.
@@jamiemarchant EGA Trek had one that saved me a few times
@@georgemaragos2378 what if they asked for a specific spreadsheet?
You've captured the esccence of MGA and the 5151 monitor just perfectly. The choice of apps and games you've demonstrated really show off the "Eerie-green-glow" personality of this system. Great work! Thank you :)
just had a look on their website, they now list it as a monochrome graphics card, and now at $8.95 .. sneaky !!
That's the bay area for you. I can't stand being stuck here
@@tarstarkusz It will sell, if it is marketed to the correct crowd that values it.
For instance, there was little to no market, for C.R.T.s, from 2010-2016, then gamers realized that they display pre-1998 video games properly, and VGA C.R.T.s make PC games look exceptionally well.
Now monitors and televisions that were brought to the curb, are being sold for money.
@@badreality2 Dont forget crt monitors can have high refresh rates
@@qwertykeyboard5901 That is true, but the computer monitor C.R.T.s that I own, are only upper mid-range. 768p @ 85Hz/1024p @ 64 Hz
But even though I don't have a really high refresh rate C.R.T., they STILL have better motion blur resolution, compared to a modern OLED. ...unless one uses a black-frame insertion mode (Trumotion), ...but that adds processing time, which adds lag.
ua-cam.com/video/z4xgLUdQhKA/v-deo.html
It makes me wish plasma's were not a thing of the past.
ua-cam.com/video/iLdkiyYeod8/v-deo.html
...imagine a plasma gaming monitor, with 1 ms refresh circuitry, and modern OLED's anti-burnin technology.
Enjoying the clicky keyboard sounds while playing Tetris. :-)
Almost ASMR ^_^
It even sounds beige.
And now the price at Alltronics has doubled!
And they ran out of them... the old tech UA-camr effect.
@@und4287 and now their site won't load