23 Sep
2004
23 Sep
'04
7:44 p.m.
On Wed, 22 Sep 2004, William Donzelli wrote:
I at one point coerced my boss into getting me a big 19" monochrome
monitor for my work PC. It had a special graphics card from
Cornerstone in it, and I dubbed it a 'Super Hercules' monitor (the
'Hercules' monographics equivalent of SVGA). It had only Windows 3
drivers, though, for anything else it was a humungous 80x25 monochrome
monitor.
It was great running a GUI on a huge high-res Monochrome display for
the kind of stuff (programming embedded controllers) stuff I was doing
at that time.
In the old days of the XT and CGA, what text
modes were supported?
I have a Wyse PC+ - an oddball XT class machine - that could run DOS in
several weird text modes (96 and 132 column, I think). I remember using it
this way for some stuff, but often certain programs would barf (Norton
Commander being one of them).
Were these modes standard?
No, but not especially rare.
The "standard" text modes were:
CGA: (startying at segment B800)
0? B&W 40 x 25
1? Color 40 x 25
2 B&W 80 x 25
3 Color 80 x 25
MDA: (starting at segment B000)
7 Mono 80 x 25
Int 10, fn 0F would return which mode you were in.
Almost all software supported modes 3 and 7. Some demented P.O.S.
programs would insist on trying to display color, even if you had
deliberately switched into mode 2.
I still have the PC+, and I doubt I will ever get
rid of it for some
reason. It is a pretty weird machine, and I don't think many were made.
Wyse made some fun weird stuff!
I liked the Wyse 700 / Amdek 1280 monitor and "special" video board, that
did 1280 x 800? b*w pixels, and could be easily coerced into 160 x 50 text