These VGA Cards have a COPROCESSOR!

We take a look at some cards that reportedly support the IBM 8514/A standard. These cards have a hardware blitter.

We also take a look at a Paradise CGA card from the mid 80s with Plantronics COLORPLUS support.

8514 Demo Diskette:

Video about Ron Belewski's 8514 Mahjong Solitaite:

Images:

IBM VGA Graphics Card - Vlask - CC-By-SA 4.0
MCA Slots - K Reichert - CC-By-SA 3.0
Amiga 500 - Bill Bertram - CC-By-SA 2.5

Other images used under fair use doctrine (e.g. non-performative work or for educational content)

[fungo]

The reason SCART had to support RGB was probably because of the SECAM color standard the French used. SECAM modulators are more complex than PAL or NTSC modulators do to the differences on how color is modulated. With RGB, you just needed some resistor ladder DAC.

Early Dendy Famiclones in Russia used to have a SECAM PPU made by UMC, but later dropped it for a PAL one because it was cheaper.

[zigmar]

Your cards are different revisions to the ones on VGA Museum. If you have the time, it'd be worth submitting them to be added.

[michaelhall]

Definitely keep the channel as a hobbyist thing. As long as you can pay the bills and put food on the table through regular work then relish the freedom!

[R.B.]

BGI (Borland Graphics Interface) I think is just a way to abstract away how to draw on the screen, but it probably isn't going to be really using the low level features. I also had BGI support for Turbo Pascal. It is just setting up the drawing mode and providing a library which could be used for drawing business graphics for a time when most PCs still weren't running Windows.

[ozzyyzzoful]

i remember all the hard work making blitters and such working through proprietary api and ports back in the days ^^
VgaDoc (4b) from Finn Thoegersen was a goldmine of information when you were out of luck getting your hands on proprietary documentation.

[jsrodman]

i physically installed an 8514/A card for an office worker who thought it would make her computer faster. She was was fairly disappointed.

[CaptainNedD]

I just stumbled on your channel. Love watching the in depth technical stuff. As for topics, one I'd like to know more about (and which strikes me as right up your alley) is were there video cards (ISA or PCI) that generate an interrupt (apparently INT2) on vertical refresh? I know you can poll some registers to detect vertical refresh but I've read around the place that INT2 on vertical refresh may have been a thing. Anyway, if you could find some time to hold forth on the subject I can guarantee you at least one viewer.
Regardless, thanks for sharing your hobby and knowledge about it.

[BryanChance]

I vaguely remember having an ATI Wonder video card with the mach32 chip. NOt sure what I did with it. LOL

[damouze]

Thank you for this great video. I have a great time learning new things about very old hardware. Have a nice holiday!

[itnaklipse]

Really find the content of your videos interesting and enjoy them (along with your jokes!), and am just glad you're going to continue in whatever capacity you enjoy.

[idadru]

Man I love stuff like this, while PCs are quite standardized these days I've found you can still find quirky hardware and novel attempts at new things in industrial components. Lots of innovation going on in the microcontroller space. I've been looking at industrial imaging/vision stuff lately too and while it's outside of my price range I see lots of novel hardware approaches there as well.

[christophero]

Any capacitor across the power input, especially to a new\different(non-system) PC board is very important. Those capacitors also prevent interference from LEAVING the video card and polluting the other slots power-supply or motherboard chip-set. Those by-passing caps are always important.

[CRG]

Very enjoyable video. The all mighty algorithm you speak of popped this one upon the home page for me and I'm glad it did, very interesting topic and I look forward yo your future video when the other card arrives.

[Scalibq]

That Paradise chipset was used by Commodore in their PC clones. They first used the PVC-2 that is on your card, and in later models they moved to the PVC-4, which afaik is the same, but integrated in a single chip. It's very similar to the ATi Graphics Solution, and later the Small Wonder.
Both the Paradise and ATi were often found in clones, as they were relatively cheap, and a single card supported both monochrome and colour monitors, at the flick of a DIP switch (the 16 MHz oscillator is for MDA/Hercules mode, where CGA runs off the timing signal from the ISA bus. Hercules support is also why it needs 64k of memory).

The "smooth scrolling" they mention on the packaging is probably a reference to text scrolling in CGA mode, which has snow on a real IBM card. These cards don't suffer from snow.

[altebander]

The divide error is actually a problem of many Turbo/Borland Pascal programs. Essentially it means that your CPU is to fast. There are programs that can slow down your CPU to avoid that problem, and in principle you could patch the delay calibration routine that causes this problem.

[ericheijnen]

Divide by zero usually means the CPU is too fast. Usually when made with an early Pascal build. I believe there are a few patchers that fix this

[douro]

The Headland HT208 (a Video Seven 1024i clone) is supposed to support 8514/a but I don't think it supports it fully. I was able to get Windows 3.1 working with the 8514/a driver on a computer which had integrated Headland graphics.

[KaldekBoch]

Ooh you mentioned my favourite card of the '90s - the Tseng Labs ET4000. I had the W32 and it was so good for raw speed in games.

[ryaxnb]

86box has emulation now of the 8514/a, which I have tested and works well with windows and os/2 8514/a drivers. It even worked in my testing with the xfree86 8514 driver. Using this card in windows, os2 or early Linux (xfree86) would be an interesting test.

[olaf]

Thank you, too for the really interesting content. Even if I'm not so interested in graphic card's, I highly enjoy your video. Please continue to talk about, what is really your hobby! It makes videos so much more enjoyable.