17 Aug
2005
17 Aug
'05
5:26 p.m.
On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 18:41:48 -0500
Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> wrote:
Tony Duell declared on Wednesday 17 August 2005 05:29
pm:
\pedantic
You can get "graphics" out of an MDA if you try hard enough. Lo-res,
of course (line drawing chars and 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, full shaded boxes in
the 128-255 part of the character set).
Also, an authentic MDA display has green pixels IIRC, so there's your
colour. Or did you mean multi-colour? :)
\meta-pedant
What do you mean when you refer to 'an authentic MDA display'? I ask,
because my original IBM PC Monochrome monitor (bought at the most recent
IUPUI auction where a number of people hecked me for bidding on it **)
can be plugged into an original IBM EGA card and it becomes quite a nice
graphical monitor. I ran Windows 3.0 on such a combination for a long
while. (aprox. until I could afford a VGA card and grayscale VGA
monitor).
(** I paid $5 for it, but then also got a Compaq Portable III in the
real leather carrying case for $10 so it wasn't _all_ overpriced.)
On Wed,
17 Aug 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
You said 'any PC'. OK, I will read 'PC' to mean 'IBM PC compatible
computer'. thus rulling out things like LGP-30s, PDP8s, etc. You did
not, however, specify a video card. I therefore assumed that any
PC-compatible video card would work, and the original IBM MDA card
is one such.
In other words, a 5150 with an MDA card is a member of the set of
'any PCs' I'd love to konw how they get colour and
grapghics out of an MDA
card in an original 5150 PC. You did say 'any PC' after all :-)
Ehm, well, if I had been correct, I wouldn't have said 'PC', since
a LGP-30 is a 'PC', too, by the terms of its time ;-))
But IBM PC does not say anything about a specific graphics card.