Good post! You may be interested in this webpage. It's a wiki vintage computer page about VGA backwards compatibility. The footnote area on this page is curious. It says that the Tseng ET4000 chipset has no compatibility mode. Perhaps this "plain vanilla" ET4000 differs from the AX variant?

Would also be interesting if the configuration program is a TSR. If it is it most likely uses the NMI to trap hardware accesses, which can mess up timing.

Someone needs to sticky topics like this one. Too many of them get shuffled to the bottom of the queue and then you have to hunt for them later.

I have changed topic to "Important"...

IMHO, I think that having just one sticky at the top of Marvin called "the best of Marvin" thread is a worthy idea. If you have too many stickies at the top of Marvin, it pushes all new threads (however good they may be) down the page in to "second place". Inside the "best of Marvin" top sticky thread, you could have a summary and link to each of these great threads.

Thanks for your comments! 😀

retro games 100 wrote:

Good post! You may be interested in this webpage. It's a wiki vintage computer page about VGA backwards compatibility. The footnote area on this page is curious. It says that the Tseng ET4000 chipset has no compatibility mode. Perhaps this "plain vanilla" ET4000 differs from the AX variant?

Yeah, I came across this wiki page too, the entry about ET4000 is probably just an oversight. Also, the compatibility mode doesn't work with all ET4000 cards. I've tried the VMODE.COM utility with a PCI ET4000/W32, and it doesn't offer the CGA compatibility mode as with the ISA ET4000AX.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

Would also be interesting if the configuration program is a TSR. If it is it most likely uses the NMI to trap hardware accesses, which can mess up timing.

Good point, I haven't thought about that. Turns out that the SVM89.EXE utility for the Trident 8900 cards is indeed a TSR. I'll change the table accordingly.
This explains why the Trident doesn't stay in CGA compatibility mode during a reset, while the other two cards keep it up until power is cut or the emulation is switched back to VGA.

About making this thread sticky: I like RG100's idea about having a "best of" thread, as the thread listing is already becoming cluttered with stickied threads. Is there someone willing to manage a "best of" topic?

For those of you with a Trident 8900, WD Paradise 90C30 or Tseng ET4000, I've attached the utilities at the first post.

Unfortunately I don't have the utilities for my old-ish VGA cards...

has someone been able to test this utility on an ATI VGA-Wonder?

curious about this one in particular, because it can drive a CGA (or mono) monitor too.

Funny that you talk about the VGA-wonder.

Im am restoring a 486 system and it has the VGA wonder XL in it.
When im done setting this all up, i could try the test with my card.

MaxWar wrote:

Im am restoring a 486 system and it has the VGA wonder XL in it.
When im done setting this all up, i could try the test with my card.

Please do! 😉 We need more CGAcomp test results!

Ok, i managed to track down the original disk images for my ati vga wonder xl !
http://ibm-pc.org/manuals/other/ati/vgawonder/vgawonder.htm
I made the test after setting display mode to cga using the utility vinstall.exe and here are the results:

Color Select Register :
--all pass

Textmode Manipulation :
-- Cursor control fails, see no cursor at all. Its actually better in vga as only Dual-line and strikethrough cursor missing then*Edit : pass after tweak
-- 8x8 font display: ok , looks like the fat font but some minor differences on a few characters (apparently same result as other cards, no big deal)

M6845 Compatibility :
--Vertical retrace: fail , 70 hz instead of 60 hz. Im actualy happy about this as i hate 60hz. 60hz = can see the screen flashing, gives headaches and drives nuts. So this one fails at failing = win 😁
--Textmode row reprog: not sure about this one, It appears to do some row reprog but im not sure if it does it properly, looks a bit weird, i would say its fail until otherwise proved. *Edit : pass after tweak
--Textmode row/col reprog: fail : I do not get a garbled display like in vga but it does not reprogram text res.
--Display positioning: Fail, should i see the screen moving ?
--Start Address reprog: fail [5] ( vertical corrupt , horizontal ok)

*All the tests not mentioned are 100% pass.

I wonder if results would be different if i was using an actual CGA monitor, as this card does have a cga connector on it! Too bad i dont have one, i would gladly trade one of my VGA monitors for a CGA one 😜

Apparently the biggest issue with the emulation if i was to use it with actual cga games would likely be with text mode reprogramming. I think im gonna try to find one of the games mentioned in the compatibility tester and see how this performs in the field !

Edit: tried a few cga game that use text mode reprogramming and they are not displaying properly, all of them. Looking at you previous results, the trident card seem to be the best one. I also have a trident isa card i think. hmmm.

nice!

can you tell if the vinstall.exe utility is a TSR (like the Trident's)?

[EDIT] - checked the manual from that link, seems like it's no TSR. Looks like this card has some fun options to play with (such as faking MDA/Hercules on any monitor in green, amber or grey) 😁

Yes the card has cool features but it does not perform as well as i would have liked in the cga emulation 🙁 . Some more tests could be done such as trying with the two other versions of Vinstall, and also trying with cga monitor.
Also there is the fact that its arguably pointless to try to play cga games on this machine as my overdriven 486 usually plays cga games about one order of magnitude too fast, even with turbo at off.

Also there is the fact that its arguably pointless to try to play cga games on this machine as my overdriven 486 usually plays cga games about one order of magnitude too fast, even with turbo at off.

You can try this... ICE enables the L1 and L2 cache while ICD disables it. Requires a 486 processor.
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9151127/icdice.zip
By using these in conjunction with the turbo switch you can *usually* get the games down to a playable speed.

I tried playing diggers, with turbo its only a screen blur. Without turbo you can see a bit whats going on, i tried to play it but at this speed its really hard. Would be a nice training for jedi apprentices.
Maybe ill try it without cache just for lulz, but id rather get my hand on a 286 😜

The best slowdown utility I remember trying is bremze, used to brake my old PII ultra smoothly down to down to XT speeds... but yeah, a 8088/286 rig would be far nicer for those.

best not to keep on derailing this thread, though 😁

Returning to the subject, i was making a bit of research on a cirrus logic vlb board i have when i stumbled on this bit of information :
"CL-GD510 + 520 - ISA SVGA "Eagle II" chipset, known for 100% CGA emulation. (1988)"
from wiki, references:
http://books.google.com/books?id=kDoEAAAAMBAJ … 0cirrus&f=false
and
http://www.oldskool.org/guides/oldonnew/video

Looks like the CL-GD510/520 chipset might be a winner 😁
Anybody got one of those ??

Since Trixter wrote that guide in the 2nd link, as well as the test utility, perhaps he'd have the results for this card?

by the way, that page also seems to have info on fixing text-mode reprogramming games on the ATI VGA Wonder (see the info on grptxt.bat which uses vinstall) 😀
maybe you can try that and rerun that specific test on your ATI?

My bad! You are totally right, i had not made the connection.
Then he says himself that the card is known for 100% cga compatibility, that probably means he tested it with his own tester?

He also writes about how to tweak Vinstall to get some cga games to display properly with the ati wonder! Maybe this ati still has some surprises to give? 😳

This topic makes me feel like im doing archeology, its pretty cool!

Edit : i tried the bat files with the vinstall commands in it and it fixes the textmode row reprogramming test as well as the cursor control test and makes the games mentioned in the exemple display properly! Really this is great. It is all written on the readme.gam file on the floppy but i overlooked it at first.

BTW Round 42 is a kickass invaders like game, i can see how cool it actually is now that it displays properly. 😁