Odd video problem

Teo Zenios wrote: Ted, I think that the video bios initialization had some early forms of monitor sensing. I believe that there was a monochrome mode vga monitor supported, which looked better with a modified grey level fed to it rather than just feeding it a color signal and trying to clean it up in the monitor. If it is the 9 pin video that was used by some XGA and PGA that does not apply, but only to the VGA. I saw it do this, and found that plugging in the right monitor and getting it to decide to run in mono mode caused it to stay that way regardless of what monitor i subsequently attached, so it is definitely the card and system doing it. If you are running linux, or could load a "live" linux and boot it, I would think that the utilities under linux, or under dos that queries the adapter bios as to the modes it will drive would be different depending on what mode it comes up in as well. I was able to purge out a video card and monitor card to get rid of my problem, but I realize EISA cards are probably a bit rare. They all use about the same approach to the vga bios though. Jim