19 Jan
2006
19 Jan
'06
4:13 p.m.
There was a PROM on the PGA, but it was for the onboard 8088. Probably no
BIOS per se. Probably the first shot in the "my graphics adapter has more
That's what I thought...
It was an odd device. IIRC in the high-res (better than CGA) mode, you
couldn't access the video memory directly. You had to send it commands
(draw a line, etc). Presumably it was not great for animations therefore...
It's still like to find one.
computational power than my motherboard" modern
trend, although in the case
of the PGA, it was just an 8088 on the adapter, not anything fancier.
Talking of peripherals with more power then their host, I'm currently
working on some old Epson laptops. The TF20 floppy drive is rather
overpowered fro the time. It could be used with the HX20, which had a
couple of 6301 processors and 16K RAM. The TF20, though, contains a Z80
and 64K RAM. About the same as the (CP/M) desktop computers of its time.
-tony