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Category Archives: VGA
Learn Something Old Every Day, Part X: The VGA Attribute Controller Is Weird
A few days ago I finally swatted a VGA emulation bug that I had known about for several years, but couldn’t identify until recently. The problem affected only Windows 3.1 running in Standard mode. It did not occur in Windows … Continue reading
Posted in Bugs, PC hardware, VGA
9 Comments
Xenix 2.2 vs. VGA
The other day I started wondering why certain old versions of 286 and 386 XENIX look a bit weird in emulation: The characters are cut off, because XENIX sets up an EGA text mode with 8×14 character matrix but uses … Continue reading
Posted in 286, 386, PC architecture, PC history, VGA, Xenix
14 Comments
FantasyLand on VGA
In 1984, Joel Gould of IBM Cambridge (that is Cambridge, Massachusetts rather than Cambridge, UK) Scientific Center wrote a demo program named FantasyLand. This demo was meant to show off the capabilities of IBM’s brand new Enhanced Graphics Adapter, or … Continue reading
Posted in IBM, PC hardware, PC history, VGA
16 Comments
More ISA VGA Benchmarks
After establishing that Trident VGA cards are indeed very slow, the natural follow-up question is: Are there cards even slower than that? But not some 8-bit VGA card from the 1980s (or a Realtek from the 1990s), and not some … Continue reading
Posted in Cirrus Logic, IBM, S3, VGA
9 Comments
About Those Trident VGAs…
An earlier post mentioned that the performance of Trident-based ISA VGA cards leaves much to be desired. A reader pointed out that such cards tend to have switchable 8-bit/16-bit bus width and performance might suffer if the card is incorrectly jumpered. … Continue reading
Posted in Trident, VGA
17 Comments
Fast Unaccelerated VGA?
For the purpose of comparing the relative real-world performance of various processors, it’s useful to run CPU and graphics-intensive benchmarks such as 3DBench or DOOM. To avoid benchmarking the graphics card instead, the VGA has to have enough headroom so … Continue reading
Posted in 386, ATi, S3, VGA
27 Comments
Windows NT BSOD Aclock Port
Do you remember the famous Windows NT Blue Screen Of Death? For years it was a source of jokes and bad reputation of Windows reliability. There even was a Blue Screen Saver! Today we fortunately see much less of it, but it … Continue reading
Posted in 386, Development, NT, VGA, Windows, x86
10 Comments
Undocumented VflatD
The virtual flat framebuffer driver, or VflatD, was introduced in Windows 95 in order to ease development of display drivers. It was surprisingly poorly documented and the sample drivers did not illustrate its use very well. A short backgrounder may … Continue reading
Posted in Documentation, VGA, Windows
2 Comments
DOS/V graphics text modes and scrolling
I recently ran into an interesting difference in the way various DOS/V versions manage VGA memory. DOS/V of course refers to the Japanese versions of DOS which are capable of running on standard “Western” hardware. Microsoft has a very long … Continue reading
Posted in DOS, VGA
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