The "Chaos Manor" column was a monthly stream-of-consciousness sort of column by Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction author who began writing his books on very early home word processing systems back in the 1970s. It was really a sort of proto-blog, where he wrote about his real-world experiences and offered long-term reviews of different hardware and software.
7:26: Fitting in a _short_ slot was a desirable feature back in the day. Remember, all-discrete-logic cards were the rule initially - which made the original CGA card so large, not only was it a full-length card, but it also required a "firebreak" tall components gap on the mainboard, and it needed fitting in a dedicated 8-bit ISA slot because of the way it extended back down after/behind its ISA connector's edge. Every square inch used, not a single cm² wasted. And since not all clones had multiple full-length slots available, fitting in a mere short slot was indeed a good feature.
Fascinating! Thanks a lot! I think i had a paradise card on my first or second 286... Getting all nostalgic just thinking of all the noises those machines world make... The boot sequence... And my naive hopes of running this or that game which was outside my reach... Do i also remember a paradise text in the pile of manuals i had? Maybe it's about the time i played the amazing Another world/Out of this world... Twice... Was it 16 colors?
10:56: You really needed the 64K for full Hercules compatibility. 32K might technically have sufficed for the resolution, but the Hercules supported two pages. RAM prices were falling fast at the time. Just a few years earlier, the 2600 made do with 128 bytes in the RIOT chip, then things went from that to a minimum of 16K RAM and 16K VRAM in the 5150, but only a few years after that, you had 64K on the Hercules or in the C64. EDIT: Oh. You mention this later. Minor correction though; I think they're saying B0000h was the 1st page and B8000h was the 2nd, not vice versa.
I used to have a very nice Compaq 386 slimline, including matching monitor and keyboard. I was using it as a 6502 cross-assembler and X1541 host until about 2000. I now have no memory of what I did with it, probably threw it out, but damn it was so sweet I wish I still had it.
Hi, still watching but my original Hercules card has 64k of RAM, so surely any card with Hercules compatibility will have the same amount. (Even if the color modes are no better than CGA like my VTECH MDA/CGA cards) Ah you figured this out later :-)
Ah also the PVC 4 sheet you were showing says it can display color modes on an MDA monitors using Paradise Color Simulation. I've seen this in operation and it works well. It can show 16 shades of gray on a normally monochrome monitor)
I was a about to say. I don't recall playing DOOM on a 386/25, but I did run DOOM on a 386/40, and it was performant enough to assume it probably still would have been playable on a 386/25. Of course the 16-colour mode is interesting in its own right, and I wonder if you could actually run a version of FastDoom on e.g. a 386SX/16 with a CGA card. Wolfenstein 3D was playable even on a 286 with VGA. Catacomb 3D and Wolf3D's ID-internal EGA origins notwithstanding, I'm not sure anyone's ever actually completed a Wolf3D EGA version. James Howard's recently done a CGA version though!
@@ropersonline I don't know how much of my slow performance were due to the CPU and the quite old VGA card, that pc was bought in 1989 or 1990. A friend of mine had a later 386 SX 33 with better a vga that run both doom 1 and 2 fine. When I managed to get a 486 DX 25 with a VLB card I could finally enjoy a full screen doom 😁
I would absolutely still play Doom like that back in the day. Or even in 16 colors, although that was not an option back then. Beggars can't be choosers..
Me too! Played through the Doom demo as a kind on the family pc around '94. The CPU was a 386 DX 25 with a WDC VGA card and PC speaker. Also played in a slightly shrunken window. Don't remember detail setting. Performance was tolerable for the time. Would only really slow down when there were a lot of enemies on the screen, kind of like X-Wing. Didn't know anything about strafing back then. Moved with the arrow keys and did all my aiming with the mouse so I fluid movement wasn't as critical. A lot of times I'd have to turn my back on the enemy just to position myself so it was a pretty intense, stressful experience. First time I saw a buddy dodge an imp fireball with a simple strafe in DOOM2 a couple years later my jaw hit the floor. ;)
What a funny coincidence! I happened to pick up one of these cards just a couple of weeks ago from a store that was closing down. Mine is a rev 3 but the layout looks almost exactly the same. I haven't fired it up yet though.
Oh that's an amazing coincidence. Maybe they are slightly more common than I thought, or maybe it's just an incredible coincidence. I wonder how the v4 differed.
@@kilianhekhuis haha great question, it was a store that had been around for around 30 years. They had soooo much stuff. They used to do board level repairs so they had a lot of ICs - 68k, Z80s, shelves of various components. I bought a couple of tubes of 74-series logic chips. They had a lot of PC stuff, XT up to more recent motherboards too. They knew the prices that things are going for in the secondhand markets like ebay, facebook etc though so things weren't as cheap as I would have liked, so I didn't buy that much. Just a CGA clone, the card in this video, the 74-series chips, and a Dallas RTC. I could easily have spent a lot more though if I hadn't stopped myself!
@@bananaboy41 I miss those kinds of stores. I used to have a few of them around me and could spend half a day there just looking for buried treasures. At some of them you could get everything from vintage tubes to computer parts to boat anchors. Sadly, you don't find those kinds of gems around very often anymore.
I was the head of jury for the "Outstanding Technical Achievement" category in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Meteoriks awards, I think I would have picked Area 5150 above every one of those, I think. Phenomenal job and sad that you won't be there this year :C
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'm not sure we are expecting to win that category, but it is still a possibility. The Amiga demo is amazing for example.
If you are into digital electronics then this 8k bytes EPROM, generically known as the 2764, is very well known and made by many manufacturers. The letters in front of the 2764 varies by manufacturer. the letters and numbers following the 2764 indicate the package type and speed (access time).
In text mode you can do multiple pages and hardware flicker free scrolling on a bog standard CGA. The snow problem on CGAs only affects early cards with RAM that isn't fast enough to handle CPU and refresh accesses in 80 column text modes. The snow would cause you problems even when reading/writing to pages outside of displayed RAM, so you'd still have to do updates only in sync periods even using double buffers. As someone else points out the 64K is for hercules compatibility which features 2 pages in graphics. Shame they didn't make it available for CGA modes.
That's correct of course but the technology is Pre-EGA. As I explain in the video, Paradise did develop EGA chipsets, but this card was based on technology that came before EGA, i.e. the 6845, Hercules, MDA, CGA and Plantronics. Clone EGA took some years to develop so it's not too surprising that Paradise were still doing this in 1986.
Damn, that's a blast from the past. That exact PC was my first PC. Although it might have been 33MHz. As a kid I reset the BIOS to default, so on every boot it would give en error and only let me use half of my RAM. Then discovered there was no way to enter the BIOS, at least that me or anyone I knew could find so I permanently crippledy PC. Does it need a boot disk or something for the BIOS? It would be great if someone could help solve this childhood mystery!
Yes, you can only change the settings with a setup disk from Compaq which boots from the floppy. I actually made an entire a video about this machine on my channel very recently. If you search in the channel videos you will find it easily.
It is kinda ugly, but it would probably have looked OK on the monochrome laptops our parents borrowed from work and I first encountered PC games on... they only had maybe 16 shades to play with anyway. Though I do kinda feel the extant EGA conversion of Wolfenstein would be more enjoyable even so.
All I remember about the Paradise card is that I was glad I didn't have one. There were so many games that had a warning on them that they didn't work with a Paradise card. I was lucky to have an ordinary 256k VGA ISA 16 bit card.
I have an early Paradise VGA 256k card in a 286 - It does some weird character glitching, but I wonder if it will work in Plantronics mode (Attack of teh Petscii Robots) without artifacting.
I don't know if the VGA cards supported Plantronics. The EGA ones did I think, if I recall correctly. But there would have been almost zero call for that in the VGA era, so I could believe they dropped it.
@@PCRetroTech All I remember is the constant warnings that "This game does not work with Paradise graphics!" Something that nobody bothers to mention on these retro videos. It's all I remember about them.
@@Heike-- I wonder what the issue is. They seem to be very conformant to the MDA, CGA, Hercules and Plantronics standards at least. Maybe they screwed up their EGA or VGA implementation.
@@PCRetroTech It's like I'm the only one who saw those warnings back in the day. Everyone goes on about how Paradise was so great and better than any other card, etc.
Yes, I agree. I'm really impressed with FastDoom (more so than the card). That's why I made it the subject of the thumbnail and description, rather than just focused on the card itself. I love it when people put so much effort into things. The game just worked flawlessly.
@@PCRetroTech I kinda feel like they need to talk to the folks who made Gloom / Dread for the Atari STe and Amiga, to get help with adapting the graphics to RGBI a bit better. Those guys did an amazing job refactoring Doom/Quake assets into 16 / 32 colours (with adjustable 4096 colour capability, sure, but there's only so much that helps when you need to cover a wide range of environments and objects with so few registers), and whilst the automatic conversion is perfectly functional, it is kinda ugly and seems to mainly use about five colours (I thought it was actually running in CGA red/yellow/green palette at first...), and presumably needs some additional processing, when a custom graphics set may work better on both fronts.
Misc notes: I wonder if the reason the page switching didn't work is because you didn't enable the 64k mapping. Maybe you can enable it by writing to where the hercules register should be after accounting for the io ports being in CGA space, or quickly switching between MDA and CGA modes and hoping the chip doesn't notice? If there's no snow, then the weird 640x100@4 tweakmode should actually work as intended -- no repeat columns. Also, I wonder if other tweakmodes are posible -- something with 16 colore comes to mind, and if video page swapping works, maybe interlaced video? It should be possible to figure out if any pin is composite: Flash a screen between all black and all white, then probe pins until one has alternating voltage. I wonder if the EGA+ rumors you talked about were early VGA prototypes -- after all, what is a VGA but a single-chip EGA with analog RGB output?
I did try enabling the 64k mapping, but that didn't change anything. I didn't try any quick switching or other hacks to get it go. I was really just looking for something that was more or less intended behaviour. I must admit it would be interesting to try some of the improper modes with the ColourPlus modes to see if they do anything interesting. I hadn't thought of that! I imagine the EGA+ rumours were IBM rumours about VGA. It was just funny to hear it talked about in the way it was.
Found another early paradise card that seems to support CGA graphics in Mono mode -- the Paradise Modular Graphics Card --, alas, I can't see the image well enough to check the chip number because VCFED requires logging in to _view a bloddy image at decent resolution for some god-forsaken reason_ It seems to feature an older chipset, so I wonder if the one on your card can support similar features. Also, there was an "Color/Mono Card" and "Basic Color Card" that had the same chip, and thus, likely similar features to this. Info about these is similarly unfindable. Some documentation on those indicate that the 3-pin connector is the composite output. I wonder what the phase offset is... According to vgamuseum dt info, the card was later renamed to Basic Video Card -- which I fear is even more unfindable in the sea of GT1030's that will inevitably bring up. In an ultimate moment of frustration, I tried to search info in the Western Digital site. Couldn't find anything, but I wonder if the truth is hidden in the archives... EDIT: Early IBM MDAs could output color. I wonder if this card does it as well in MDA emulation mode, if so, that could allow for a 90x22 text tweakmode (or instead an actually useful 90x44i chars if interlaced works on this card)
@@FavoritoHJS I did try looking into the WD archives and never found anything. A website for WD imaging went up briefly in the 1990's (IIRC) but had no useful information. I think the main WD site has always been for their HD business. The trail went cold for me there. In case you are still looking into this, the chips I'm aware of are the PVC-2, PVC-4, PEGA1A, PEGA2A, PPC1, PPC2, and the Paradise 88 VGA chipset. The cards I know of (some of which are rebrands of the same card) are: Short Mono, Short Color, Hi-Res Graphics, Multi Display Card, Modular Graphics Card, Autoswitch EGA, Autoswitch EGA 350, Autoswitch EGA 480, Color/Mono Card, OEM6 EGA, OEM8 EGA, Monochrome CGA. MGC II, 8514/A+, SVGA, Bali 32, Bali 64, VGA Pro, VGA Plus. I likely missed some VGA cards as I was less interested in these. There was also a multifunction card they produced which had RAM expansion on it. I forget the name, but it is advertised almost everywhere the other Paradise cards are. It was very popular.
@@RetroDawn Yes, see "A strange secret feature of the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA)" by TubeTimeUS. I doubt an era-accurate monitor would work, since they would be fixed-rate and thus not capable of displaying the higher hsync rate that the MDA provides.
Way back in the day when I was specing out a computer to replace my Tandy 1000, I almost bought a Paradise card. I don't think it was that one. I felt limited by the Tandy 1000 graphics and I don't believe I would look at a card that wasn't at least EGA. I ended up getting an ATI VGA Wonder.
This wouldn't have really been an upgrade on Tandy 1000 graphics I don't think. That already had pretty good 16 colour graphics, depending on which model you had.
@@PCRetroTech Yes, but an ATI *VGA* Wonder was an upgrade over EGA or Tandy graphics. That's not to say pixel artists couldn't have produced good EGA art and bad VGA art (ppl needed time to adjust to new tools and tech), or that some Super EGA (SEGA, hehe :) cards didn't outdo some VGA clones in hi-rez 16-colour modes, but generally VGA was a big step up. Did you reflexively misread ATI VGA Wonder as ATI Small Wonder? I wonder.
AT&T 6300 compatibility claim is a curious one seeing as there's only a 16MHz oscillator on there. AFAIK the 400-line mode that was shared by the 6300 and a few clones / badge engineered sister machines used at least a 20MHz pixel clock, maybe 24MHz even. EGA pushes the limits somewhat to get 640x350 at 60Hz with that frequency, MAYBE you might be able to get 640x400 at 50Hz as well, but it likely wouldn't be too compatible with the official monitors rather than multisync (or an EGA one if you had a 50Hz-happy example)? Could you get detailed shots of the timing diagrams if it actually shows the details for those unusual high rez modes? edit: ah wait, your card is a PVC2 and the manual is for PVC4 ... presumably the latter would have had dual oscillators or something. There were enough typical super-EGAs (even some super-CGA/MDAs) that did that anyhow in order to give e.g. 132-column mode... So leveraging it in order to run 400-line instead would have been fairly trivial. edit2: yeah, there, tucked away on one of the quickly scrolled pages - it actually allows selection between three different clocks. Which wasn't too rare a config in the S-EGA days. Standard 16MHz, something in the 24-26MHz range which gave you 640x480 and wide textmode, and a comedy third option, e.g. 34MHz for 800x600 or perhaps something in-between the first two for, er, reasons? (And ofc if it can do clock dividing then you can try to share 32.5MHz between 800x600 and regular EGA, and have two other options available besides) edit3: and on the next page the examples are given of 14.318MHz (CGA / IBM motherboard standard, probably sourced direct from the ISA slot), 16.257MHz (MDA / EGA standard, though you could also use the Herc-standard 16.0), and 24.0MHz (Olivetti/AT&T, 132-col and ersatz VGA). The PVC2 clearly lacking the third option, and probably only being able to select between bus 14.318 and onboard 16, like a regular EGA would when swtiching modes. Plus there's also mention of needing dual bank memory to achieve effective 40ns / 25MHz operation ... so if you only have one bank (like this card probably does), you can only hit 16MHz anyway. Probably it alternates where it reads from and interleaves the waiting period, setting up the read from the second bank whilst still waiting for the first to respond... ....hmm i wonder if "2x 16K x8" for the two-bank memory mode is supposed to be 32K per bank, or total, given that a single chip is 64K? (as chip capacities increased by powers of 4 usually, you wouldn't see a single 32K x8 after all... so you'd have to pair up and have two per bank, probably?) Having "composite intensity" is interesting. That basically turns the video output into an analogue greyscale, though it may only be capable of 3 or 4 intensities (black, maybe dim, regular, and bright). And yeah Olivetti machines did have monochrome and colour monitors available, though they were still basically the same as CGA / MDA in most respects. I think I've seen a picture of them being able to natively simulate colour through greyscales on the monochrome ones, so that may be the purpose of having composite intensity, but the full colour ones were straight RGBI. The base spec of the machine's video system was to only have enough RAM (and generator board logic) to support black and white though, I think? Or possibly monochrome in hi-rez (32KB...) and colour (possibly even Plantronics grade) in lower resolutions. And you could add one, two, three additional 32K banks to have four, eight, sixteen colours in hi.
The card might have been designed to support it, but this version of the card not. That seems to be quite common in cards. Features were planned, made it into marketing material, but not implemented in early versions.
@@PCRetroTech Yeah I probably started writing a little too early. I'm thinking basically the PCV2 is Plantronics / Hercules only (might be pre-Olivetti entirely, or a cheaper model that doesn't include the extra parts as they'd only be attractive to a limited market of people who had or were prepared to drop significant money to buy a compatible monitor...), and the PCV4 either came along later and added that ability, or was the more expensive option with all those boxes ticked. I think there's a small amount of hardware acceleration that would have to be supported (just stuff like automatic dither pattern fills and maybe some line/circle drawing, nothing advanced), but otherwise there's not much to those 400-line modes. The fine detail is a bit obscure - until someone can put a scope on the actual hardware and find out which of the multiple and mutually contradictory manufacturer technical manuals have the right numbers in them - but at heart it's pretty much CGA (including the 6845 controller) with 32K memory or more (additional 32K banks = additional bitplanes in hi-rez), a 24MHz oscillator (actually the motherboard clock signal in the original machines), and a ROM that includes 6845 register programming data for the additional modes (not quite double the CGA values as the frequency isn't actually 2x, and the blanking is less). So it wouldn't really have been much great shakes to implement, if the same controller chip was used across all the boards. Might have wanted 128K to give 16 colours in hi-rez though, rather than 64K. (The last bit of secret sauce is that the 400-line machines had some kind of "scrambler" PGA chip which was switched in when the hi-rez monitor was connected - fixed frequency at 25-ish khz, so incapable of 15khz 200-line modes at the hardware level much like a VGA monitor - to translate CGA register writes by the BIOS, or any software that uses custom modes, into something that makes sense to the controller and won't blow up the monitor. The compatibility wasn't perfect but it did mean a lot more classic IBM software would work than you'd otherwise expect, without having to connect a low frequency monitor. And of course it would mask out the LSB for the line counter when using "200 line" mode to bring about line-doubling... so timing based raster effects would fail, most of 8088MPH / Area 5150, and probably more than a few of your own custom graphics routines, but, eh... Oh and of course the way all that worked had similar bandwidth-limit effects to VGA, so with a single bank / bitplane your max colours would be dependent on horizontal resolution, not memory space ... 640 monochrome, 320 4-colour, and that's it. Dunno if that would at least give you Plantronics "for free" on the Olivetti and its clones with a 15kHz monitor, though that would make sense... CGA has enough underscan that it should still work OK at 12MHz rather than 14, so long as you're not trying to use composite output to a TV, so the memory could be effectively double-clocked...)
@@tahrey Yeah I think the PVC2 vs PVC4 difference was probably something like what you suggested. It's also very possible that these chips didn't emulate the 6300 at all well, but that it was just a marketing point to convince people to buy it. Perhaps it even did something on a genuine monitor.
@@PCRetroTech Maybe someone wanting to keep their high rez when moving to a different machine... Or it could just be bluster. I wonder if anyone actually successfully used those modes in anger ;)
Interesting how the PVC4 manual describes the CGA palette choice... "Blue on / blue off" and "Intensity on / off", which is of course what literally happens with the three "foreground" colours, and it's a more logical way of describing it, even if not quite as illustrative as the usual way of listing off the colours in the set... I wonder if it still gives you red/cyan/white if you mess around with the black-and-white / composite output flags in the previous register though? And I kinda think the medium-rez diagram has got a bit confused. Presumably in 640x200 for Plantronics you should have the exact same colour palettes and settings as CGA in 320x200 (as it was basically CGA with two extra bitplanes and very little other modification), rather than just a single "foreground intensity" selection? Or was it literally stuck in a single palette at all times, making the four colour ability even more limited than otherwise might have been expected? (And of course the palette settings mean basically nothing for Plantronics in 320x200, each bitplane mapping directly to an output bit in the monitor port) Shame mode 1-1 wasn't a 16 colour 160x200 like in the PCjr / Tandy, too. They could have more closely shared a quasi standard set of extended resolutions, then.
I'd expect Plantronics to be 16 colour, so no effect from the palette. I'm not sure what would happen setting the palette in 4 colour modes. Maybe the same as CGA.
@@PCRetroTech Ah, I was only thinking of the hi-rez mode, so 640x200 4-colour. It was my understanding that it worked basically like regular CGA but with 64kbit bitplanes instead of 32k (as opposed to the low-rez 16-colour which arranges the memory to have 4 planes not 2). So your colour choices are still limited to those fixed palettes. Could be wrong about that though, and would be entirely happy if that was the case as it shows they weren't quite as lazy as all that. Even though it would still make the register bit a little confusing - if you can freely pick 4 out of 16 colours, what would the "foreground intensity" be for? (Foreground I take to mean the three fixed palette colours, as opposed to the user-selectable background that's usually set to black or sometimes dark blue). That would make more sense for monochrome 640x200 where the RGB bits of the foreground (against unchanging black background) are set elsewhere... But I've seen manuals even for later SVGA cards that describe the high-rez 4-colour modes (e.g. XGA compatible, as they didn't have enough memory for 16 colour) in terms that very much sounds like "CGA low rez but with a lot more pixels"... fixed and somewhat terrible palettes, weird 4-line interleaved addressing, etc. So there seems to be some kind of thread there.
@@tahrey I'd be incredibly surprised if you could choose any 4 out of 16 colours. I've never encountered something like that. And I think that for pretty much the same reasons as you. I think it would be fixed palettes.
@@PCRetroTech Hm, there were equivalent modes on other systems that gave you free reign, but in the PC space it only seems to be fairly rare examples. The Olivetti/etc hirez modes with 2 memory banks, the top mode on base 64K EGA, the CGA mode of MCGA (which was part of why I asked about the Defender game, it looks like it's in 4 colours but not quite a true CGA palette, and maybe with a midframe switch of one of the colours to give 5 total...) and, uh, that's it? (Windows 2.0 demonstrates the EGA version at least - the default colour set is black/white/red/blue, like a less garish Amiga workbench colour set, but Microsoft seems to prefer a medium green colour instead of blue ... sort of like a less garish ST Medium Rez default palette)
@@tahrey That sounds like about it. For a moment I thought the Tandy might have had something, but I'm misremembering there. It had 16 colours in one mode and four fixed colours I think in other modes. It's stretching my memory though, so maybe I am wrong about that.
With a fast CPU, Amiga's HAM mode can play Quake. ua-cam.com/video/btoU_CQSg7A/v-deo.html Amiga 500's HAM mode is the same as Amiga 1000's 1985 era HAM mode.
@@PCRetroTech The raster framebuffer's performance is a major factor e.g. ua-cam.com/video/octArwHpaiY/v-deo.html Athlon XP 2200+ (1800 MHz, three instructions issue per cycle, out-of-order processing) with IBM PS/2 Display Adapter VGA couldn't match Amiga's HAM mode with a fast CPU (ARM Cortex A53, 1.4Ghz, dual instruction issue per cycle, in-order processing, bare-metal JIT emulating a very fast 68040 CPU). ARM Cortex A53 is an inferior CPU core when compared to AMD Athlon XP 2200+. For memory bandwidth conservation, Amiga's HAM mode acts like MJPEG compression without the DCT stage. Modern PC GPUs have delta color compression (DCC), texture compression, and decoder/encoder video hardware. Retro PC functions are built-in into modern PCs via TPM LPC to ISA slot adaptor running SoundBlaster 16 ISA and it's running DOS Doom e.g. ua-cam.com/video/IXr-VEpQ1lg/v-deo.html
Amiga 500 is an original Amiga (then retconned as the 1000) in a smaller box after all. There wasn't any change to HAM, even with ECS, until AGA came along. Being able to play any kind of game using it is quite a triumph though. I imagine you need a *very* fast CPU and some quite clever code. Or just a PC feeding it ready processed video data through a bus link. (it is at least a nice hack that HAM doesn't use any more bandwidth than 64-colour halfbrite, or 8-colour in high rez ... but that does still take away half your effective CPU / data transfer bandwidth, so fastram is also a must alongside the accelerator, and the actual computer then only really acts as a kind of bottlenecked video card... and in which case having the entire bus overclocked, or using a faster machine like the 3000/4000 in the first place may help)
Is that Deskpro 386 an EISA machine? I've got one of those QVision 1024Es in a Deskpro 50M, and I benchmarked one in a 486 EISA / VESA system and it was pretty comparable to VLB cards. In DOOM play, it was about as good as a Trident 8900D (which is marginally faster than a TSENG 4000, ISA of course).
Yes, there were a lot of bits and pieces missing from this system when I got it. Others have said the EISA video cards are pretty performant, but there does seem to be some disagreement on it. It would be interesting to benchmark to find out for sure.
@@PCRetroTech Well, if you have an EISA system, get yourself a Trident 8900D (It has to be D, the other ones are just slow) and compare :D You'll be surprised :D
Don't get too hung up on the chronology. They did keep making cards to "earlier" standards even after later-generation hardware hit the market. You could get an EGA card and monitor in 1984 for the requisite pocket change, but on the lower end, there still was a market for so-called "pre-EGA" tech well into the nineties. Especially Hercules compatibles. If you couldn't splurge on an expensive colour monitor, there wasn't necessarily a huge difference between a VGA card with only its green channel output to a cheap amber display and a Hercules card and compatible monitor. In some ways, the "one third-assed" cheap mono VGA solution of just ignoring or not even connecting the R and B pins at all was worse than Hercules, because the Hercules monitor would always faithfully show you all the Hercules card tried to output. This makes me wonder if the reason the Paradise "Hi-Res Graphics" card failed was because they mercatted :) it wrong. If they hadn't oversold the resolution and just positioned it as a cheap Hercules compatible with extra gravy, maybe they could have done better. Or maybe the card actually was a defective design as per the Chaos Manor review and that's why it failed?
The 1986 card is a compatible standing in for the Plantronics Colorplus, a super CGA card from 1982 with improved video modes similar to TGA on the Tandy's. Actual Plantronics cards are pretty rare these days so using a compatible for tinkering makes sense. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus I had no idea someone modified Doom to run on these. That's so cool!
Yes I'm just a migrant here in the UK and can't earn any income of any kind outside of special categories defined by the Government. They are really worried migrants are going to take all the jobs or something like that.
I think that's their logic. Because you know, UA-cam personalities are going to have their jobs stolen if we come to the UK to do that! Utterly faulty logic. But I wrote the Government to get a ruling on it since lots of people have been trying to get a ruling on UA-cam made public through FOIA for ages, and those are definitely the rules.
From the native side of the fence ... yeah ... they're kinda obsessed. Did kinda think it was mainly aimed at refugees and other travellers from more impoverished lands, but perhaps down under also counts now? (I've seen it before that South Africa does... and that caused enough problems that a friend decided to up sticks with their ex-SA spouse and just move to an entirely different, less stupid country). Current UK governance is a basket case in all honesty.
I live in the UK and migrants cannot accept income (of any kind, including donations) outside of what the Government allows. I had this checked by a legal team with the Home Office.
@@PCRetroTech I hated mine because I couldn't upgrade the RAM, there was no CMOS/BIOS setup (there was, but it required a diskette) the onboard VGA was 256k (no way to upgrade that either) and you couldn't even replace the floppies, because, you guessed it, proprietary. I mean it did teach me DOS 5 and I had a lot of fun with it, but even my neighbour's kid had a 286/20 with 2 Mb of RAM and a 66 Mb hard disk... and you could swap it all out. I had a bunch of chances to get my original 386/20e from various auctions to recycling places, I never bothered. Nothing against the design language or especially the way the amber (on mine anyhow) IDE LED flickered.
@@the_kombinator I never liked onboard video. Fortunately mine doesn't have that. Thankfully the floppy in mine still works. About the only reason for people to sell those online is because they know they aren't working, so replacing them is pretty much impossible.
You don't have to "sell" your videos to us with silly titles. Just my opinion. I've seen everything since late 1970's... But keep up the good work! Have you seen any VGA-card with Edsun Labs CEG-chip? (CEG=Continous Edge Graphics) As I know it was first chip (DAC) ever to implement anti-aliasing, but as far as I know there is NO actual VGA-card using it? Because I remember CEG in early 90's but VGA-cards developed (more RAM) very quickly so more memory meant no more need for such tweaks. PS. I read Jerry Pournelle from maybe 1984-85 to around 1992. Great columns!
Good question. I looked into it and its a Report Program Generator. Some business thing I guess. They were available way back in the CP/M days apparently.
Semi unrelated comment you've probably addressed: Why are 256k VGA cards not capable of 640x400x256? Is it a page thing? I think the first Macintosh LC did it.
That's an interesting question. The main issue was probably just the size of the aperture in the CPU address space which was set aside for video RAM. This was only 64kb. Without bitplanes that limits you to 320x200x256. But bitplanes limit you to 16 colours as you have just the four planes (I suppose they could have added more planes). Of course SVGA changed all this, but at the cost of very complex ways of controlling which block of VRAM appeared in the video memory aperture.
@@PCRetroTech I never tried this out back in the day, but both EGA and VGA have their VRAM start at segment 0xA000. Hercules starts at 0xB000 and CGA starts at 0xB800. They also both have support for Hercules and CGA compatible video modes. Does this mean that EGA and VGA cards could be tricked into opening a 128kB aperture from 0xA000 through 0xBFFF ?
@@damouze The main issue is that the VGA registers doesn't allow such combination, even if the 640x400x256 resolution fits in 256k of VRAM (using unchained mode). If I remember correctly trixster was able to create a configuration for VGA cards to output that resolution, but it also made your monitor scream of pain because usage of non-common frequencies
@@damouze @Damouze I'm not aware of any way to trick them to do that in general. The main issue is that some systems would have multiple graphics cards so you can't really use the entire aperture for just one card. However, there were cards that by default respected their boundaries but could be configured to use more of the aperture.
My EuroPC has the PVC4 chip...if I knew that possibilities in 1988 man... I would have done much better in comparison with the Amiga/AtariST guys ;) As they saw "my machine" with PCSPK and regular 4color CGA they told me to throw that damn thing out of the window....but I did not ;)
Ha ha! Those Atari guys just had no taste. They should have recognised that the more expensive machine is obviously better, even if it looks worse. LOL.
@@PCRetroTech do you think that it is possible to get the "water" a call it pixelshader-look-like effect from the area5150 demo working the the gfx-chip of the europc ? or does this effect uses features that only the real cga controller offers and are not implemented in the gfx-chip of the europc. I also never saw a demo or a demo effect using the plantronics mode...as I understand benedikt it is a relatively slow "mode" so it does not offer enough "performance" on such a low-end system...btw. I have nec v20 in my machine.
@@drzeissler It wouldn't be possible without a harness wired up to the chip and one hell of a lot of patience to get the timings exactly right. The demo took years to produce, so there's not going to be ports to other chips.
There's a dancing tracking dot on your face in the facecam parts of the video. Nothing disturbing but I guess it's not something you actually want there :)
@@PCRetroTech It's all relative. I recently re-explored this issue, and can recount that several of the early video terminals/computers started out with 32x16 text mode (TV Typewriter, Sphere 1, CoCo, ZX81, Speccy, TI99/4A) and many more did 40x25 text. There also was 64x16 text mode as an alternative to 40x25, because 40x25=1000, but 64x16=1024, so _No Byte Left Behind™._ Compared with 32x16 text mode, 64x16 was "high res" (160x128 pixels vs 320x128px, non-APA, both often implemented using the venerable Signetics 2513 [so 8x5px matrix]). And the struggle for 80 columns was real. 640x200 and 720x350 (or 348) is much more "high res" than the above, and this Paradise thing was even APA-capable, wow! That said, you're both basically still right, because by 1986, actual monitor production had ramped up, and for actual PCs and clones, using TVs as monitors wasn't the done thing anymore. For home computers, okay, but not with the PC. You could do it with the CGA, but few did and MODE 40 remained underused. This Paradise card was only "Hi-Res" when pitched against then-still common low-end home computers, or pioneering systems from the previous decade, but it was literally no better resolution-wise than any of the options available for the PC at launch five years earlier, in 1981. And if that unsolicited verbiage hasn't put you off and you actually feel compelled to hear more utterances on the topic out of the same pie-hole, see my comments under the 8-Bit Show and Tell video _"My New Favourite C64 One-Liner?"_
It's considered a form of payment and there are strict rules about what form of income a migrant in the UK can have. I've checked into this with a formal ruling so I know 100% I have the law right here.
@@PCRetroTech How far does that go? If I wanted to hire you from outside the UK, does that mean I couldn't? Is this a temporary restriction, i.e. did you get married or employer-sponsored, and is this a road-to-citizenship rule that'll no longer apply once you get citizenship or full legal resident rights?
That's an interesting description of the UK. 🙂 No I'm just a migrant here in the UK and can't earn any income of any kind outside of special categories defined by the Government. They are *really* worried migrants are going to take all the jobs or something like that.
The "Chaos Manor" column was a monthly stream-of-consciousness sort of column by Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction author who began writing his books on very early home word processing systems back in the 1970s. It was really a sort of proto-blog, where he wrote about his real-world experiences and offered long-term reviews of different hardware and software.
Fantastic! Thanks for the detail, which I was not aware of!
I always loved reading that.
Yes one!
7:26: Fitting in a _short_ slot was a desirable feature back in the day. Remember, all-discrete-logic cards were the rule initially - which made the original CGA card so large, not only was it a full-length card, but it also required a "firebreak" tall components gap on the mainboard, and it needed fitting in a dedicated 8-bit ISA slot because of the way it extended back down after/behind its ISA connector's edge. Every square inch used, not a single cm² wasted. And since not all clones had multiple full-length slots available, fitting in a mere short slot was indeed a good feature.
Fascinating! Thanks a lot! I think i had a paradise card on my first or second 286... Getting all nostalgic just thinking of all the noises those machines world make... The boot sequence... And my naive hopes of running this or that game which was outside my reach...
Do i also remember a paradise text in the pile of manuals i had? Maybe it's about the time i played the amazing Another world/Out of this world... Twice... Was it 16 colors?
Thanks for a new Video. I like your videos a lot 🙏
10:56: You really needed the 64K for full Hercules compatibility. 32K might technically have sufficed for the resolution, but the Hercules supported two pages. RAM prices were falling fast at the time. Just a few years earlier, the 2600 made do with 128 bytes in the RIOT chip, then things went from that to a minimum of 16K RAM and 16K VRAM in the 5150, but only a few years after that, you had 64K on the Hercules or in the C64.
EDIT: Oh. You mention this later. Minor correction though; I think they're saying B0000h was the 1st page and B8000h was the 2nd, not vice versa.
I used to have a very nice Compaq 386 slimline, including matching monitor and keyboard. I was using it as a 6502 cross-assembler and X1541 host until about 2000. I now have no memory of what I did with it, probably threw it out, but damn it was so sweet I wish I still had it.
That's a feeling I'm familiar with. We threw out so much back then!
Wow. Looks better than I thought.
Hi, still watching but my original Hercules card has 64k of RAM, so surely any card with Hercules compatibility will have the same amount. (Even if the color modes are no better than CGA like my VTECH MDA/CGA cards)
Ah you figured this out later :-)
Ah also the PVC 4 sheet you were showing says it can display color modes on an MDA monitors using Paradise Color Simulation. I've seen this in operation and it works well. It can show 16 shades of gray on a normally monochrome monitor)
Ah, I noticed that as I was reading through but didn't know precisely what was meant by color simulation. Thanks for filling in the blank there.
I used to play doom on a 386 DX 25! In low detal mode with the viewport slightly smaller was not too bad 😅
I was a about to say. I don't recall playing DOOM on a 386/25, but I did run DOOM on a 386/40, and it was performant enough to assume it probably still would have been playable on a 386/25. Of course the 16-colour mode is interesting in its own right, and I wonder if you could actually run a version of FastDoom on e.g. a 386SX/16 with a CGA card. Wolfenstein 3D was playable even on a 286 with VGA. Catacomb 3D and Wolf3D's ID-internal EGA origins notwithstanding, I'm not sure anyone's ever actually completed a Wolf3D EGA version. James Howard's recently done a CGA version though!
@@ropersonline I don't know how much of my slow performance were due to the CPU and the quite old VGA card, that pc was bought in 1989 or 1990. A friend of mine had a later 386 SX 33 with better a vga that run both doom 1 and 2 fine.
When I managed to get a 486 DX 25 with a VLB card I could finally enjoy a full screen doom 😁
I would absolutely still play Doom like that back in the day. Or even in 16 colors, although that was not an option back then.
Beggars can't be choosers..
Me too! Played through the Doom demo as a kind on the family pc around '94. The CPU was a 386 DX 25 with a WDC VGA card and PC speaker. Also played in a slightly shrunken window. Don't remember detail setting. Performance was tolerable for the time. Would only really slow down when there were a lot of enemies on the screen, kind of like X-Wing.
Didn't know anything about strafing back then. Moved with the arrow keys and did all my aiming with the mouse so I fluid movement wasn't as critical. A lot of times I'd have to turn my back on the enemy just to position myself so it was a pretty intense, stressful experience. First time I saw a buddy dodge an imp fireball with a simple strafe in DOOM2 a couple years later my jaw hit the floor. ;)
What a funny coincidence! I happened to pick up one of these cards just a couple of weeks ago from a store that was closing down. Mine is a rev 3 but the layout looks almost exactly the same. I haven't fired it up yet though.
Oh that's an amazing coincidence. Maybe they are slightly more common than I thought, or maybe it's just an incredible coincidence. I wonder how the v4 differed.
@@PCRetroTech Probably got the page flipping added!
How does a "closing down store" have 1986 cards in stock??
@@kilianhekhuis haha great question, it was a store that had been around for around 30 years. They had soooo much stuff. They used to do board level repairs so they had a lot of ICs - 68k, Z80s, shelves of various components. I bought a couple of tubes of 74-series logic chips. They had a lot of PC stuff, XT up to more recent motherboards too. They knew the prices that things are going for in the secondhand markets like ebay, facebook etc though so things weren't as cheap as I would have liked, so I didn't buy that much. Just a CGA clone, the card in this video, the 74-series chips, and a Dallas RTC. I could easily have spent a lot more though if I hadn't stopped myself!
@@bananaboy41 I miss those kinds of stores. I used to have a few of them around me and could spend half a day there just looking for buried treasures. At some of them you could get everything from vintage tubes to computer parts to boat anchors. Sadly, you don't find those kinds of gems around very often anymore.
I was the head of jury for the "Outstanding Technical Achievement" category in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Meteoriks awards, I think I would have picked Area 5150 above every one of those, I think. Phenomenal job and sad that you won't be there this year :C
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I'm not sure we are expecting to win that category, but it is still a possibility. The Amiga demo is amazing for example.
If you are into digital electronics then this 8k bytes EPROM, generically known as the 2764, is very well known and made by many manufacturers. The letters in front of the 2764 varies by manufacturer. the letters and numbers following the 2764 indicate the package type and speed (access time).
In text mode you can do multiple pages and hardware flicker free scrolling on a bog standard CGA. The snow problem on CGAs only affects early cards with RAM that isn't fast enough to handle CPU and refresh accesses in 80 column text modes. The snow would cause you problems even when reading/writing to pages outside of displayed RAM, so you'd still have to do updates only in sync periods even using double buffers.
As someone else points out the 64K is for hercules compatibility which features 2 pages in graphics. Shame they didn't make it available for CGA modes.
I'm trying to concentrate on the video, honest, but the highlight to me is that Compaq 386 and monitor setup.
It's an odd combination isn't it. IBM 5153 with a 386 machine. A very nice 386 machine of course.
This video earned my subscription to your channel. Awesome work!
The AT and EGA came out in 84, so 2 years before this card.
That's correct of course but the technology is Pre-EGA. As I explain in the video, Paradise did develop EGA chipsets, but this card was based on technology that came before EGA, i.e. the 6845, Hercules, MDA, CGA and Plantronics. Clone EGA took some years to develop so it's not too surprising that Paradise were still doing this in 1986.
Damn, that's a blast from the past.
That exact PC was my first PC. Although it might have been 33MHz.
As a kid I reset the BIOS to default, so on every boot it would give en error and only let me use half of my RAM. Then discovered there was no way to enter the BIOS, at least that me or anyone I knew could find so I permanently crippledy PC.
Does it need a boot disk or something for the BIOS? It would be great if someone could help solve this childhood mystery!
Yes, you can only change the settings with a setup disk from Compaq which boots from the floppy. I actually made an entire a video about this machine on my channel very recently. If you search in the channel videos you will find it easily.
Haha wow! Doom on 386 w/EGA. Younger me would’ve been very appreciative of this in 1995 😂
LOL same. I "played" it on an SX/20 (386) - the tiniest window possible...
@@the_kombinatorit’s still cool 😂
Not even EGA, Plantronics mode.
It is kinda ugly, but it would probably have looked OK on the monochrome laptops our parents borrowed from work and I first encountered PC games on... they only had maybe 16 shades to play with anyway.
Though I do kinda feel the extant EGA conversion of Wolfenstein would be more enjoyable even so.
@@the_kombinator " Buy a 486 :-) "
I would still play Doom like that back in the day
Me too, absolutely!
I still play Quake
33:49 - Naah, you're picking up armor.
All I remember about the Paradise card is that I was glad I didn't have one. There were so many games that had a warning on them that they didn't work with a Paradise card. I was lucky to have an ordinary 256k VGA ISA 16 bit card.
I have an early Paradise VGA 256k card in a 286 - It does some weird character glitching, but I wonder if it will work in Plantronics mode (Attack of teh Petscii Robots) without artifacting.
I don't know if the VGA cards supported Plantronics. The EGA ones did I think, if I recall correctly. But there would have been almost zero call for that in the VGA era, so I could believe they dropped it.
@@PCRetroTech All I remember is the constant warnings that "This game does not work with Paradise graphics!" Something that nobody bothers to mention on these retro videos. It's all I remember about them.
@@Heike-- I wonder what the issue is. They seem to be very conformant to the MDA, CGA, Hercules and Plantronics standards at least. Maybe they screwed up their EGA or VGA implementation.
@@PCRetroTech It's like I'm the only one who saw those warnings back in the day. Everyone goes on about how Paradise was so great and better than any other card, etc.
FastDoom is ridiculously impressive! Despite a slightly shit card :P Weird to release the card without page flipping.
Yes, I agree. I'm really impressed with FastDoom (more so than the card). That's why I made it the subject of the thumbnail and description, rather than just focused on the card itself. I love it when people put so much effort into things. The game just worked flawlessly.
@@PCRetroTech I kinda feel like they need to talk to the folks who made Gloom / Dread for the Atari STe and Amiga, to get help with adapting the graphics to RGBI a bit better. Those guys did an amazing job refactoring Doom/Quake assets into 16 / 32 colours (with adjustable 4096 colour capability, sure, but there's only so much that helps when you need to cover a wide range of environments and objects with so few registers), and whilst the automatic conversion is perfectly functional, it is kinda ugly and seems to mainly use about five colours (I thought it was actually running in CGA red/yellow/green palette at first...), and presumably needs some additional processing, when a custom graphics set may work better on both fronts.
Nice smile at the beggining :D
I have yes idea what that would be. I guess the render software screwed up somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
Misc notes:
I wonder if the reason the page switching didn't work is because you didn't enable the 64k mapping. Maybe you can enable it by writing to where the hercules register should be after accounting for the io ports being in CGA space, or quickly switching between MDA and CGA modes and hoping the chip doesn't notice?
If there's no snow, then the weird 640x100@4 tweakmode should actually work as intended -- no repeat columns.
Also, I wonder if other tweakmodes are posible -- something with 16 colore comes to mind, and if video page swapping works, maybe interlaced video?
It should be possible to figure out if any pin is composite: Flash a screen between all black and all white, then probe pins until one has alternating voltage.
I wonder if the EGA+ rumors you talked about were early VGA prototypes -- after all, what is a VGA but a single-chip EGA with analog RGB output?
I did try enabling the 64k mapping, but that didn't change anything. I didn't try any quick switching or other hacks to get it go. I was really just looking for something that was more or less intended behaviour.
I must admit it would be interesting to try some of the improper modes with the ColourPlus modes to see if they do anything interesting. I hadn't thought of that!
I imagine the EGA+ rumours were IBM rumours about VGA. It was just funny to hear it talked about in the way it was.
Found another early paradise card that seems to support CGA graphics in Mono mode -- the Paradise Modular Graphics Card --, alas, I can't see the image well enough to check the chip number because VCFED requires logging in to _view a bloddy image at decent resolution for some god-forsaken reason_
It seems to feature an older chipset, so I wonder if the one on your card can support similar features.
Also, there was an "Color/Mono Card" and "Basic Color Card" that had the same chip, and thus, likely similar features to this. Info about these is similarly unfindable.
Some documentation on those indicate that the 3-pin connector is the composite output. I wonder what the phase offset is...
According to vgamuseum dt info, the card was later renamed to Basic Video Card -- which I fear is even more unfindable in the sea of GT1030's that will inevitably bring up.
In an ultimate moment of frustration, I tried to search info in the Western Digital site. Couldn't find anything, but I wonder if the truth is hidden in the archives...
EDIT: Early IBM MDAs could output color. I wonder if this card does it as well in MDA emulation mode, if so, that could allow for a 90x22 text tweakmode (or instead an actually useful 90x44i chars if interlaced works on this card)
@@FavoritoHJS I did try looking into the WD archives and never found anything. A website for WD imaging went up briefly in the 1990's (IIRC) but had no useful information. I think the main WD site has always been for their HD business. The trail went cold for me there.
In case you are still looking into this, the chips I'm aware of are the PVC-2, PVC-4, PEGA1A, PEGA2A, PPC1, PPC2, and the Paradise 88 VGA chipset. The cards I know of (some of which are rebrands of the same card) are: Short Mono, Short Color, Hi-Res Graphics, Multi Display Card, Modular Graphics Card, Autoswitch EGA, Autoswitch EGA 350, Autoswitch EGA 480, Color/Mono Card, OEM6 EGA, OEM8 EGA, Monochrome CGA. MGC II, 8514/A+, SVGA, Bali 32, Bali 64, VGA Pro, VGA Plus. I likely missed some VGA cards as I was less interested in these.
There was also a multifunction card they produced which had RAM expansion on it. I forget the name, but it is advertised almost everywhere the other Paradise cards are. It was very popular.
@@FavoritoHJS Early MDA's output in color? Same resolution? What monitor of that time could possibly support that?
@@RetroDawn Yes, see "A strange secret feature of the IBM Monochrome Display Adapter (MDA)" by TubeTimeUS.
I doubt an era-accurate monitor would work, since they would be fixed-rate and thus not capable of displaying the higher hsync rate that the MDA provides.
Oh I remember the original Paradise cards, they were quite expensive back in the day.
I love this channel!
Way back in the day when I was specing out a computer to replace my Tandy 1000, I almost bought a Paradise card. I don't think it was that one. I felt limited by the Tandy 1000 graphics and I don't believe I would look at a card that wasn't at least EGA. I ended up getting an ATI VGA Wonder.
This wouldn't have really been an upgrade on Tandy 1000 graphics I don't think. That already had pretty good 16 colour graphics, depending on which model you had.
@@PCRetroTech Yes, but an ATI *VGA* Wonder was an upgrade over EGA or Tandy graphics. That's not to say pixel artists couldn't have produced good EGA art and bad VGA art (ppl needed time to adjust to new tools and tech), or that some Super EGA (SEGA, hehe :) cards didn't outdo some VGA clones in hi-rez 16-colour modes, but generally VGA was a big step up. Did you reflexively misread ATI VGA Wonder as ATI Small Wonder? I wonder.
@@ropersonline By *this* I meant the topic of this video.
@@PCRetroTech Oh, I see. Thanks.
Played doom on my 386 all the time. Had a svga card though.
Can it play Doom... yes it can!
AT&T 6300 compatibility claim is a curious one seeing as there's only a 16MHz oscillator on there. AFAIK the 400-line mode that was shared by the 6300 and a few clones / badge engineered sister machines used at least a 20MHz pixel clock, maybe 24MHz even. EGA pushes the limits somewhat to get 640x350 at 60Hz with that frequency, MAYBE you might be able to get 640x400 at 50Hz as well, but it likely wouldn't be too compatible with the official monitors rather than multisync (or an EGA one if you had a 50Hz-happy example)?
Could you get detailed shots of the timing diagrams if it actually shows the details for those unusual high rez modes?
edit: ah wait, your card is a PVC2 and the manual is for PVC4 ... presumably the latter would have had dual oscillators or something. There were enough typical super-EGAs (even some super-CGA/MDAs) that did that anyhow in order to give e.g. 132-column mode... So leveraging it in order to run 400-line instead would have been fairly trivial.
edit2: yeah, there, tucked away on one of the quickly scrolled pages - it actually allows selection between three different clocks. Which wasn't too rare a config in the S-EGA days. Standard 16MHz, something in the 24-26MHz range which gave you 640x480 and wide textmode, and a comedy third option, e.g. 34MHz for 800x600 or perhaps something in-between the first two for, er, reasons? (And ofc if it can do clock dividing then you can try to share 32.5MHz between 800x600 and regular EGA, and have two other options available besides)
edit3: and on the next page the examples are given of 14.318MHz (CGA / IBM motherboard standard, probably sourced direct from the ISA slot), 16.257MHz (MDA / EGA standard, though you could also use the Herc-standard 16.0), and 24.0MHz (Olivetti/AT&T, 132-col and ersatz VGA). The PVC2 clearly lacking the third option, and probably only being able to select between bus 14.318 and onboard 16, like a regular EGA would when swtiching modes. Plus there's also mention of needing dual bank memory to achieve effective 40ns / 25MHz operation ... so if you only have one bank (like this card probably does), you can only hit 16MHz anyway. Probably it alternates where it reads from and interleaves the waiting period, setting up the read from the second bank whilst still waiting for the first to respond...
....hmm i wonder if "2x 16K x8" for the two-bank memory mode is supposed to be 32K per bank, or total, given that a single chip is 64K? (as chip capacities increased by powers of 4 usually, you wouldn't see a single 32K x8 after all... so you'd have to pair up and have two per bank, probably?)
Having "composite intensity" is interesting. That basically turns the video output into an analogue greyscale, though it may only be capable of 3 or 4 intensities (black, maybe dim, regular, and bright).
And yeah Olivetti machines did have monochrome and colour monitors available, though they were still basically the same as CGA / MDA in most respects. I think I've seen a picture of them being able to natively simulate colour through greyscales on the monochrome ones, so that may be the purpose of having composite intensity, but the full colour ones were straight RGBI. The base spec of the machine's video system was to only have enough RAM (and generator board logic) to support black and white though, I think? Or possibly monochrome in hi-rez (32KB...) and colour (possibly even Plantronics grade) in lower resolutions. And you could add one, two, three additional 32K banks to have four, eight, sixteen colours in hi.
The card might have been designed to support it, but this version of the card not. That seems to be quite common in cards. Features were planned, made it into marketing material, but not implemented in early versions.
@@PCRetroTech Yeah I probably started writing a little too early. I'm thinking basically the PCV2 is Plantronics / Hercules only (might be pre-Olivetti entirely, or a cheaper model that doesn't include the extra parts as they'd only be attractive to a limited market of people who had or were prepared to drop significant money to buy a compatible monitor...), and the PCV4 either came along later and added that ability, or was the more expensive option with all those boxes ticked.
I think there's a small amount of hardware acceleration that would have to be supported (just stuff like automatic dither pattern fills and maybe some line/circle drawing, nothing advanced), but otherwise there's not much to those 400-line modes. The fine detail is a bit obscure - until someone can put a scope on the actual hardware and find out which of the multiple and mutually contradictory manufacturer technical manuals have the right numbers in them - but at heart it's pretty much CGA (including the 6845 controller) with 32K memory or more (additional 32K banks = additional bitplanes in hi-rez), a 24MHz oscillator (actually the motherboard clock signal in the original machines), and a ROM that includes 6845 register programming data for the additional modes (not quite double the CGA values as the frequency isn't actually 2x, and the blanking is less). So it wouldn't really have been much great shakes to implement, if the same controller chip was used across all the boards. Might have wanted 128K to give 16 colours in hi-rez though, rather than 64K.
(The last bit of secret sauce is that the 400-line machines had some kind of "scrambler" PGA chip which was switched in when the hi-rez monitor was connected - fixed frequency at 25-ish khz, so incapable of 15khz 200-line modes at the hardware level much like a VGA monitor - to translate CGA register writes by the BIOS, or any software that uses custom modes, into something that makes sense to the controller and won't blow up the monitor. The compatibility wasn't perfect but it did mean a lot more classic IBM software would work than you'd otherwise expect, without having to connect a low frequency monitor. And of course it would mask out the LSB for the line counter when using "200 line" mode to bring about line-doubling... so timing based raster effects would fail, most of 8088MPH / Area 5150, and probably more than a few of your own custom graphics routines, but, eh...
Oh and of course the way all that worked had similar bandwidth-limit effects to VGA, so with a single bank / bitplane your max colours would be dependent on horizontal resolution, not memory space ... 640 monochrome, 320 4-colour, and that's it. Dunno if that would at least give you Plantronics "for free" on the Olivetti and its clones with a 15kHz monitor, though that would make sense... CGA has enough underscan that it should still work OK at 12MHz rather than 14, so long as you're not trying to use composite output to a TV, so the memory could be effectively double-clocked...)
@@tahrey Yeah I think the PVC2 vs PVC4 difference was probably something like what you suggested. It's also very possible that these chips didn't emulate the 6300 at all well, but that it was just a marketing point to convince people to buy it. Perhaps it even did something on a genuine monitor.
@@PCRetroTech Maybe someone wanting to keep their high rez when moving to a different machine... Or it could just be bluster. I wonder if anyone actually successfully used those modes in anger ;)
Interesting how the PVC4 manual describes the CGA palette choice... "Blue on / blue off" and "Intensity on / off", which is of course what literally happens with the three "foreground" colours, and it's a more logical way of describing it, even if not quite as illustrative as the usual way of listing off the colours in the set... I wonder if it still gives you red/cyan/white if you mess around with the black-and-white / composite output flags in the previous register though?
And I kinda think the medium-rez diagram has got a bit confused. Presumably in 640x200 for Plantronics you should have the exact same colour palettes and settings as CGA in 320x200 (as it was basically CGA with two extra bitplanes and very little other modification), rather than just a single "foreground intensity" selection? Or was it literally stuck in a single palette at all times, making the four colour ability even more limited than otherwise might have been expected? (And of course the palette settings mean basically nothing for Plantronics in 320x200, each bitplane mapping directly to an output bit in the monitor port)
Shame mode 1-1 wasn't a 16 colour 160x200 like in the PCjr / Tandy, too. They could have more closely shared a quasi standard set of extended resolutions, then.
I'd expect Plantronics to be 16 colour, so no effect from the palette. I'm not sure what would happen setting the palette in 4 colour modes. Maybe the same as CGA.
@@PCRetroTech Ah, I was only thinking of the hi-rez mode, so 640x200 4-colour. It was my understanding that it worked basically like regular CGA but with 64kbit bitplanes instead of 32k (as opposed to the low-rez 16-colour which arranges the memory to have 4 planes not 2). So your colour choices are still limited to those fixed palettes.
Could be wrong about that though, and would be entirely happy if that was the case as it shows they weren't quite as lazy as all that. Even though it would still make the register bit a little confusing - if you can freely pick 4 out of 16 colours, what would the "foreground intensity" be for? (Foreground I take to mean the three fixed palette colours, as opposed to the user-selectable background that's usually set to black or sometimes dark blue). That would make more sense for monochrome 640x200 where the RGB bits of the foreground (against unchanging black background) are set elsewhere...
But I've seen manuals even for later SVGA cards that describe the high-rez 4-colour modes (e.g. XGA compatible, as they didn't have enough memory for 16 colour) in terms that very much sounds like "CGA low rez but with a lot more pixels"... fixed and somewhat terrible palettes, weird 4-line interleaved addressing, etc. So there seems to be some kind of thread there.
@@tahrey I'd be incredibly surprised if you could choose any 4 out of 16 colours. I've never encountered something like that. And I think that for pretty much the same reasons as you. I think it would be fixed palettes.
@@PCRetroTech Hm, there were equivalent modes on other systems that gave you free reign, but in the PC space it only seems to be fairly rare examples. The Olivetti/etc hirez modes with 2 memory banks, the top mode on base 64K EGA, the CGA mode of MCGA (which was part of why I asked about the Defender game, it looks like it's in 4 colours but not quite a true CGA palette, and maybe with a midframe switch of one of the colours to give 5 total...) and, uh, that's it?
(Windows 2.0 demonstrates the EGA version at least - the default colour set is black/white/red/blue, like a less garish Amiga workbench colour set, but Microsoft seems to prefer a medium green colour instead of blue ... sort of like a less garish ST Medium Rez default palette)
@@tahrey That sounds like about it. For a moment I thought the Tandy might have had something, but I'm misremembering there. It had 16 colours in one mode and four fixed colours I think in other modes. It's stretching my memory though, so maybe I am wrong about that.
With a fast CPU, Amiga's HAM mode can play Quake. ua-cam.com/video/btoU_CQSg7A/v-deo.html
Amiga 500's HAM mode is the same as Amiga 1000's 1985 era HAM mode.
I imagine the fast CPU is the key there. But nice video, I hadn't seen that before.
@@PCRetroTech The raster framebuffer's performance is a major factor e.g. ua-cam.com/video/octArwHpaiY/v-deo.html
Athlon XP 2200+ (1800 MHz, three instructions issue per cycle, out-of-order processing) with IBM PS/2 Display Adapter VGA couldn't match Amiga's HAM mode with a fast CPU (ARM Cortex A53, 1.4Ghz, dual instruction issue per cycle, in-order processing, bare-metal JIT emulating a very fast 68040 CPU).
ARM Cortex A53 is an inferior CPU core when compared to AMD Athlon XP 2200+.
For memory bandwidth conservation, Amiga's HAM mode acts like MJPEG compression without the DCT stage. Modern PC GPUs have delta color compression (DCC), texture compression, and decoder/encoder video hardware.
Retro PC functions are built-in into modern PCs via TPM LPC to ISA slot adaptor running SoundBlaster 16 ISA and it's running DOS Doom e.g. ua-cam.com/video/IXr-VEpQ1lg/v-deo.html
Amiga 500 is an original Amiga (then retconned as the 1000) in a smaller box after all. There wasn't any change to HAM, even with ECS, until AGA came along.
Being able to play any kind of game using it is quite a triumph though. I imagine you need a *very* fast CPU and some quite clever code. Or just a PC feeding it ready processed video data through a bus link.
(it is at least a nice hack that HAM doesn't use any more bandwidth than 64-colour halfbrite, or 8-colour in high rez ... but that does still take away half your effective CPU / data transfer bandwidth, so fastram is also a must alongside the accelerator, and the actual computer then only really acts as a kind of bottlenecked video card... and in which case having the entire bus overclocked, or using a faster machine like the 3000/4000 in the first place may help)
Very cool card, but it's sad you didn't get the EISA VGA that came with the system originally. (Compaq QVision 1024E) It's incredibly performant.
Is that Deskpro 386 an EISA machine? I've got one of those QVision 1024Es in a Deskpro 50M, and I benchmarked one in a 486 EISA / VESA system and it was pretty comparable to VLB cards. In DOOM play, it was about as good as a Trident 8900D (which is marginally faster than a TSENG 4000, ISA of course).
Yes, there were a lot of bits and pieces missing from this system when I got it. Others have said the EISA video cards are pretty performant, but there does seem to be some disagreement on it. It would be interesting to benchmark to find out for sure.
@@PCRetroTech Well, if you have an EISA system, get yourself a Trident 8900D (It has to be D, the other ones are just slow) and compare :D You'll be surprised :D
Neat video, but how is a card from 1986 "Pre-EGA"? (That came out in 1984 with the PC/AT, right?)
Don't get too hung up on the chronology. They did keep making cards to "earlier" standards even after later-generation hardware hit the market. You could get an EGA card and monitor in 1984 for the requisite pocket change, but on the lower end, there still was a market for so-called "pre-EGA" tech well into the nineties. Especially Hercules compatibles. If you couldn't splurge on an expensive colour monitor, there wasn't necessarily a huge difference between a VGA card with only its green channel output to a cheap amber display and a Hercules card and compatible monitor. In some ways, the "one third-assed" cheap mono VGA solution of just ignoring or not even connecting the R and B pins at all was worse than Hercules, because the Hercules monitor would always faithfully show you all the Hercules card tried to output. This makes me wonder if the reason the Paradise "Hi-Res Graphics" card failed was because they mercatted :) it wrong. If they hadn't oversold the resolution and just positioned it as a cheap Hercules compatible with extra gravy, maybe they could have done better. Or maybe the card actually was a defective design as per the Chaos Manor review and that's why it failed?
The 1986 card is a compatible standing in for the Plantronics Colorplus, a super CGA card from 1982 with improved video modes similar to TGA on the Tandy's. Actual Plantronics cards are pretty rare these days so using a compatible for tinkering makes sense.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plantronics_Colorplus
I had no idea someone modified Doom to run on these. That's so cool!
Yes I'm just a migrant here in the UK and can't earn any income of any kind outside of special categories defined by the Government. They are really worried migrants are going to take all the jobs or something like that.
I think that's their logic. Because you know, UA-cam personalities are going to have their jobs stolen if we come to the UK to do that! Utterly faulty logic. But I wrote the Government to get a ruling on it since lots of people have been trying to get a ruling on UA-cam made public through FOIA for ages, and those are definitely the rules.
From the native side of the fence ... yeah ... they're kinda obsessed. Did kinda think it was mainly aimed at refugees and other travellers from more impoverished lands, but perhaps down under also counts now? (I've seen it before that South Africa does... and that caused enough problems that a friend decided to up sticks with their ex-SA spouse and just move to an entirely different, less stupid country).
Current UK governance is a basket case in all honesty.
@@tahrey Yes more!
Interesting you say you're not allowed to accept donations. From whence is the interdiction? Have you taken a vow of computer junk poverty?
I live in the UK and migrants cannot accept income (of any kind, including donations) outside of what the Government allows. I had this checked by a legal team with the Home Office.
@@PCRetroTech jeez. What happens if it's your birthday, or your laptop breaks and someone gives you their old one to use?
@@tahrey There are obviously exceptions for such cases. I'm talking about crowdsourced donations.
6:10 What do you mean you're not allowed to accept donations? Almost every other channel does (LGR is a great example).
LGR is not a migrant in the UK.
Hah my first PC was a Deskpro 386/20e - I did not like it one bit. These days, I have a full EISA 50M :D Not the greatest for playing games though.
I guess they were business machines back in the day? Nowadays I think they look just fantastic.
@@PCRetroTech I hated mine because I couldn't upgrade the RAM, there was no CMOS/BIOS setup (there was, but it required a diskette) the onboard VGA was 256k (no way to upgrade that either) and you couldn't even replace the floppies, because, you guessed it, proprietary.
I mean it did teach me DOS 5 and I had a lot of fun with it, but even my neighbour's kid had a 286/20 with 2 Mb of RAM and a 66 Mb hard disk... and you could swap it all out.
I had a bunch of chances to get my original 386/20e from various auctions to recycling places, I never bothered.
Nothing against the design language or especially the way the amber (on mine anyhow) IDE LED flickered.
@@the_kombinator I never liked onboard video. Fortunately mine doesn't have that. Thankfully the floppy in mine still works. About the only reason for people to sell those online is because they know they aren't working, so replacing them is pretty much impossible.
You don't have to "sell" your videos to us with silly titles. Just my opinion. I've seen everything since late 1970's... But keep up the good work!
Have you seen any VGA-card with Edsun Labs CEG-chip? (CEG=Continous Edge Graphics)
As I know it was first chip (DAC) ever to implement anti-aliasing, but as far as I know there is NO actual VGA-card using it? Because I remember CEG in early 90's but VGA-cards developed (more RAM) very quickly so more memory meant no more need for such tweaks.
PS. I read Jerry Pournelle from maybe 1984-85 to around 1992. Great columns!
I read him in the nineties. A shane I had to leave all those magazines when I moved. I still regret that. Would have made a great reference today.
what's a complete mini rpg environment for pc (magazine ad)
Good question. I looked into it and its a Report Program Generator. Some business thing I guess. They were available way back in the CP/M days apparently.
Semi unrelated comment you've probably addressed:
Why are 256k VGA cards not capable of 640x400x256? Is it a page thing? I think the first Macintosh LC did it.
That's an interesting question. The main issue was probably just the size of the aperture in the CPU address space which was set aside for video RAM. This was only 64kb. Without bitplanes that limits you to 320x200x256. But bitplanes limit you to 16 colours as you have just the four planes (I suppose they could have added more planes).
Of course SVGA changed all this, but at the cost of very complex ways of controlling which block of VRAM appeared in the video memory aperture.
@@PCRetroTech I never tried this out back in the day, but both EGA and VGA have their VRAM start at segment 0xA000. Hercules starts at 0xB000 and CGA starts at 0xB800. They also both have support for Hercules and CGA compatible video modes. Does this mean that EGA and VGA cards could be tricked into opening a 128kB aperture from 0xA000 through 0xBFFF ?
@@damouze The main issue is that the VGA registers doesn't allow such combination, even if the 640x400x256 resolution fits in 256k of VRAM (using unchained mode). If I remember correctly trixster was able to create a configuration for VGA cards to output that resolution, but it also made your monitor scream of pain because usage of non-common frequencies
@@viti95 I was just curious, but I expected as much.
@@damouze @Damouze I'm not aware of any way to trick them to do that in general. The main issue is that some systems would have multiple graphics cards so you can't really use the entire aperture for just one card. However, there were cards that by default respected their boundaries but could be configured to use more of the aperture.
My EuroPC has the PVC4 chip...if I knew that possibilities in 1988 man... I would have done much better in comparison with the Amiga/AtariST guys ;)
As they saw "my machine" with PCSPK and regular 4color CGA they told me to throw that damn thing out of the window....but I did not ;)
Ha ha! Those Atari guys just had no taste. They should have recognised that the more expensive machine is obviously better, even if it looks worse. LOL.
@@PCRetroTech do you think that it is possible to get the "water" a call it pixelshader-look-like effect from the area5150 demo working the the gfx-chip of the europc ? or does this effect uses features that only the real cga controller offers and are not implemented in the gfx-chip of the europc. I also never saw a demo or a demo effect using the plantronics mode...as I understand benedikt it is a relatively slow "mode" so it does not offer enough "performance" on such a low-end system...btw. I have nec v20 in my machine.
@@drzeissler It wouldn't be possible without a harness wired up to the chip and one hell of a lot of patience to get the timings exactly right. The demo took years to produce, so there's not going to be ports to other chips.
@@PCRetroTech Thx for clearing that out.
@@PCRetroTech ua-cam.com/video/HvjhKY67fPI/v-deo.html seems to be the same effekt.
There's a dancing tracking dot on your face in the facecam parts of the video. Nothing disturbing but I guess it's not something you actually want there :)
I have no idea what that would be. I guess the render software screwed up somehow. Thanks for pointing it out.
where can i get a copy of doom and duke nukem3d?
Internet Archive.
Why can’t you take donations? I see many channel do mail call episodes with tons of boxes sent by viewers.
It's not legal for migrants in the UK as UA-cam is not on the list of shortage occupations.
Why would you not be allowed to accept donations?
As a migrant I cannot receive income of any kind outside the list of shortage occupations, and UA-cam is not on that list.
@@PCRetroTech Shortage occupations? I've not heard that term before.
@@Lachlant1984 Some stupid UK legislation. I'm not surprised no one but migrants have heard of this. But you can look it up.
"high res" ok I think I stay with my VooDoo 3 The only enjoyable game on those old cards and hardware was Prince 1
Yeah they kinda exaggerated a bit there didn't they. :-)
@@PCRetroTech It's all relative. I recently re-explored this issue, and can recount that several of the early video terminals/computers started out with 32x16 text mode (TV Typewriter, Sphere 1, CoCo, ZX81, Speccy, TI99/4A) and many more did 40x25 text. There also was 64x16 text mode as an alternative to 40x25, because 40x25=1000, but 64x16=1024, so _No Byte Left Behind™._ Compared with 32x16 text mode, 64x16 was "high res" (160x128 pixels vs 320x128px, non-APA, both often implemented using the venerable Signetics 2513 [so 8x5px matrix]). And the struggle for 80 columns was real. 640x200 and 720x350 (or 348) is much more "high res" than the above, and this Paradise thing was even APA-capable, wow! That said, you're both basically still right, because by 1986, actual monitor production had ramped up, and for actual PCs and clones, using TVs as monitors wasn't the done thing anymore. For home computers, okay, but not with the PC. You could do it with the CGA, but few did and MODE 40 remained underused. This Paradise card was only "Hi-Res" when pitched against then-still common low-end home computers, or pioneering systems from the previous decade, but it was literally no better resolution-wise than any of the options available for the PC at launch five years earlier, in 1981. And if that unsolicited verbiage hasn't put you off and you actually feel compelled to hear more utterances on the topic out of the same pie-hole, see my comments under the 8-Bit Show and Tell video _"My New Favourite C64 One-Liner?"_
Why are you not allowed to accept donations?
Migrants in the UK can only receive income (of any kind) in Government approved categories.
Why are you not allow to accept donations?
It's considered a form of payment and there are strict rules about what form of income a migrant in the UK can have. I've checked into this with a formal ruling so I know 100% I have the law right here.
@@PCRetroTech Well, that sucks.
Which is ironic given that our corrupt and greedy Tory MPs take money from all sorts of dodger donors.
@@PCRetroTech How far does that go? If I wanted to hire you from outside the UK, does that mean I couldn't?
Is this a temporary restriction, i.e. did you get married or employer-sponsored, and is this a road-to-citizenship rule that'll no longer apply once you get citizenship or full legal resident rights?
Why are you not allowed to receive donations? Are you in a prison? I don't understand.
That's an interesting description of the UK. 🙂
No I'm just a migrant here in the UK and can't earn any income of any kind outside of special categories defined by the Government. They are *really* worried migrants are going to take all the jobs or something like that.
30 minutes of blah blah for 20 seconds of actual Doom port demo. Thumb down 👎