On Thu, 28 Feb 2013, Cindy Croxton Electronics Plus wrote:
We have IBM 5150s here. I can put almost any 8-bit
ISA video card in it,
and get the boot sequences on the screen.
The absolutely EARLIEST of the 16K 5150s don't check for ROMs on video
cards during boot.
The second? revision of the BIOS for the 16K 5150 took care of that.
If it is supposed to be color,
but comes up b/w, then I make a batch program called color.bat or whatever
and reference the driver for the card, and presto, I have color. Some of
these old cards came with drivers, and I have a very large collection of
these very old drivers.
Good to know!
Some of the old cards have switches or some other
means to set the graphics
mode and resolution, but others do not. There are very few old 8-bit cards
that will not work on the 5150.
I have never seen Autocad for a 5150, but there are
color games for the
5150, and if you have a color monitor, the games have code in them to set
the colors and resolution. Since there were a number of cards, and thus a
wide variety of options for the game programmers, they usually chose 8 or 16
colors, and told the user to choose 40 or 80 columns, and then you had a
color game. Granted, circles and ovals looked like a bunch of tiny squares
lined up to make a circle or oval, but they ran pretty well.
For some reason, CGA AutoCad never really caught on.