My New IBM Enhanced Color Display 5154!

I was so excited I had to post this story here, and maybe someone else can benefit as well.

So all this began several weeks ago, when I was combing eBay for an IBM Enhanced Color Display Model 5154. This is a regular search, but usually I come up empty. This time, a new listing popped up, but as soon as I pulled it up, I became disheartened. Here's why:



This was the picture posted on the listing. So I just put the thing on my "watch" list, and left it alone for the rest of the evening. The more I thought about it, the image definitely showed something was wrong. Wasn't sure what, though. It didn't look like it had lost any vertical or horizontal control. The image looked suspiciously like a synch problem. Now this could have been caused by some faulty circuitry inside that had gone bad. It was probably beyond my skills to fix, I thought. Then again, you never learn anything by just doing what you're comfortable with. The seller in his listing also said that the image changed according to the boot stage his computer was at.

My interest grew, so I contacted the seller and asked him what hardware he used to run the monitor on to take the listing picture. He said it was a modern desktop with an "adapter" plug which converted the 15-pin VGA port to a 9-pin connector. I asked if it popped, smoked, buzzed, burned, or did anything else bizarre when it was on, and he said no. Interesting! I knew that setup wouldn't work, but would it produce the scattered image in the listing? No-one had bid yet, probably because of the listing picture of the scrambled picture. I bid, and spent the next few days rethinking this whole gamble and watching anxiously.

I won the auction, he shipped the item (which was packed extremely well, thankfully). I was so excited when I opened it up because it had its share of scuffs, but was fairly clean overall. The screen was spotless, and the knobs seemed to work well. It was very cold, so I let it sit for several hours to warm-up so condensation on the cold innards wouldn't cause any shorts or problems (not sure if this is absolutely necessary, but I usually do this). During this time, I inspected it further. The d-sub connector had what was described as a "open section of cable with bare wires". Ugg. It sounded awful and I had wondered what was actually going on. I saw the actual plug, and it turns out someone had nabbed the "hood" or "casing" for the d-sub connector, leaving a working plug tip, but without the chrome casing for the plug. Now who would do that?

When I couldn't stand it any longer, I plugged it into my 5150 which had an IBM EGA adapter in it. I had to change the switches so it would expect an EGA monitor. I turned it on, prepared to immediately turn it off if I saw smoke or fire or worse. Nothing bad happened, and the monitor came to life!

My machine booted up just fine, and the monitor appears to be fully operational. Very nice clean picture. I'm so happy with it, and I'm glad I decided to gamble on it.

In the several hours of testing I've done, I've noticed one thing. It emits a high-pitched buzz occasionally, which seems to be coming from the left side (if facing the monitor screen). It goes away when I lightly tap the left side, so I haven't given it much thought. I found a metal d-sub connector hood from Radio-Shack which fits perfectly on the naked connector, so at least that's repaired. I would have loved to put an original chrome one on it, but couldn't find anyone selling one of those.

Another thing I've noticed - I think my EGA card has problems! None of these problems reared their ugly heads before on my CGA monitor. Some of my EGA tests have resulted in some very garbled screens, and it seems to have to do with certain EGA modes. I haven't figured out any patterns yet, but it seems to be happening on the 640x350 mode. I used DeluxePaint to test it. The 320x200x16 and 640x200x16 appeared to work initially. Then I noticed some screen garbling when pulling down some menus (with a sort of gridlike distortion over when the menu was opening). In some cases, the whole screen garbled with this distortion. The whole screen color was off when running in 640x350 with 16 colors (I think). Then again, my EGA card is missing the daughter board, so maybe that's why the 640x350x16 looks funny? I thought the regular EGA adapter only has 64k without the daughter board, so in 640x350, it can only do 4 colors.

Few of the games I tried worked. EGATrek appeared, but the colors on the initial screen looked funny, and the play screen was missing some of the boxes. King's Quest II worked fine. FaeryTale Adventure scrambled the whole screen horribly.

I tried running the diagnostics disk, but that blanked out the left quarter of the screen and put a vertical row of short horizontal blocks next to it. And this was superimposed on the normal menu that appears when you just boot the disk.

Anyone have any insights as to what might be going on? I'm all open to ideas.

I've had problems with my VGA Wonder in this machine, and people suggested that I remove the other cards in it to see if that affected these issues. Unless someone has a better thing to try first, I'll give that a go and report back.

Anyway, it's a mixed bag of emotions, but generally I'm very happy. Now I've got to do some diagnostic work with the EGA card! Sorry for writing a book.

Congratulations on finding a working 5154 ! There aren't many of those still around.....

As I recall the Sierra Games like Kings Quest were 'well behaved' and are
most likely detecting the EGA hardware correctly. I've received mixed results
with some other games that 'supported' EGA .....even when running with 256KB video
memory. Simcity by Maxis was another game that also supported high res EGA
modes and always worked correctly for me. If some games appear to be missing
graphics you may need to 'pull out' the contrast knob and adjust that...if the contrast
isn't set correctly this can happen. Do you have any other EGA adapters you could try ?

The issues you're seeing with the EGA diagnostic might be a concern.......
I just booted my XT with 5154 and IBM EGA card/256 K using the 2.25 version
XT diagnostics. In the EGA tests, option 6) Hi-res graphics displays three patterns
640x200 white squares, 640x200 color bars , and 640x350 color bars......
The color bar tests looked okay on my setup. Are you also running version 2.25 of the
diagnostics ?

When you power on the display, does the green light come on right away and are characters
displayed on the screen within a few seconds ? I've read about some issues with leaky (bad)
capacitors in the display's power supply that can cause a delay when powering the unit on.
Bad capacitors can also cause lots of other strange behaviour in these displays. Hopefully thats
not the case here, but just something to consider.

mikey,

Thanks! Yeah, I'm excited about it.

Hmm. I'm not sure what other games I have that support EGA. I seem to remember Prince of Persia having a spiffy looking version, but not sure if that was VGA or EGA. I'll have to give the contrast knob adjustment a try.

The diagnostic disk I'm using is a v2.02 original disk.

When I turn the monitor on, it displays an image in a few seconds. That actually makes me think of another, EXTREMELY odd thing. Get this - since changing the settings on the EGA card to expect the EGA monitor, and since plugging in this monitor, the computer takes AGES to reboot! When I boot the machine initially, everything seems normal. Then, when I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, it blacks out the screen for almost a whole minute before rebooting. I don't know what's going on with this. It shouldn't be doing memory tests again, right? In any case, it didn't do this before. Any ideas on that?

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll give them a try and report my findings.

So the 5150 booted faster with the CGA adapter/display attached ? interesting
Maybe its testing the EGA video memory ....

My 5150 also takes awhile to boot, but I haven't tried it recently with an EGA attached.
On the 5150 there is no screen indication during boot except for a blinking cursor....
the 5160 displays a memory count during boot.

Which reminds me I need to do my periodic power up of some of my PC's soon
I'll try some of these different options and see what happens. I also have a few
ATI VGA Wonders I'm curious to see if they'll work in any of my 5150's. I read
your other thread about having issues ..... I've always been a big fan of the ATI VGA
Wonder and thought it would work in 8-bit mode on any IBM PC, but have never actually tried it :-(

what you're experiencing as pertaining to the picture you posted, is a loss of horizontal sync. As long as the card itself isn't flakey (I scanned your lengthy post quickly, and I'm not sure that has been established), you can correct that rather easily by twisting the trimpot slightly that controls "horizontal hold". Not sure how it would be labeled, you might have to consult the technical docs for that monitor (I believe I have them, not sure). If different modes are producing different results, well I'll have to look over your post when I have more time. You have to remember that in those days there were _many_ EGA cards on the market, which had _many_ new fandangled screen resolutions/frequencies. I never played around w/EGA cards much at all (possibly never), but I would have to imagine that you'll encounter a problem somewhere along that rocky path. Try plugging your card and doing "tests" w/a multiscanning monitor, like an NEC Multisync or M* II. If you're lucky enough to have one. Most people don't. Newer monitors aren't truly digital (careful, terms get recycled in computerland quite frequently), but rather only accept analong color inputs. Nor can the utter vast majority scan down to the roughly 24khz the EGA puts out.

mikey99 said:

So the 5150 booted faster with the CGA adapter/display attached ? interesting
Maybe its testing the EGA video memory ....

My 5150 also takes awhile to boot, but I haven't tried it recently with an EGA attached.
On the 5150 there is no screen indication during boot except for a blinking cursor....
the 5160 displays a memory count during boot.

Which reminds me I need to do my periodic power up of some of my PC's soon
I'll try some of these different options and see what happens. I also have a few
ATI VGA Wonders I'm curious to see if they'll work in any of my 5150's. I read
your other thread about having issues ..... I've always been a big fan of the ATI VGA
Wonder and thought it would work in 8-bit mode on any IBM PC, but have never actually tried it :-(

Click to expand...

OK. Let me know what you find.

I've only had my VGA Wonder for several weeks now, but I really like it, except for its unusual behavior on my 5150. I like how you can switch the startup resolution via software, the auto-detection of the monitor (thus removing dip switch settings), the CGA/EGA/VGA options, and the inclusion of the bus mouse port as well!

I was thinking it might be testing the EGA memory, too. I didn't notice the slowdown on initial boot because the 5150 take AGES to go through 640KB, but it's really noticeable on a warm boot. For the first few times, I thought my machine was locked up and I just powered down. It was only after doing this gyration about 10 times that I stopped, just sat there befuddled, staring at the infinite blackness of the frozen screen, when it spun the disk drive! I timed it the next time at almost a minute.

tipc said:

what you're experiencing as pertaining to the picture you posted, is a loss of horizontal sync. As long as the card itself isn't flakey (I scanned your lengthy post quickly, and I'm not sure that has been established), you can correct that rather easily by twisting the trimpot slightly that controls "horizontal hold". Not sure how it would be labeled, you might have to consult the technical docs for that monitor (I believe I have them, not sure). If different modes are producing different results, well I'll have to look over your post when I have more time. You have to remember that in those days there were _many_ EGA cards on the market, which had _many_ new fandangled screen resolutions/frequencies. I never played around w/EGA cards much at all (possibly never), but I would have to imagine that you'll encounter a problem somewhere along that rocky path. Try plugging your card and doing "tests" w/a multiscanning monitor, like an NEC Multisync or M* II. If you're lucky enough to have one. Most people don't. Newer monitors aren't truly digital (careful, terms get recycled in computerland quite frequently), but rather only accept analong color inputs. Nor can the utter vast majority scan down to the roughly 24khz the EGA puts out.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. Sorry, the post was probably overly long. It's actually a picture the original seller posted on eBay when he connected it to his modern VGA computer with a VGA-to-EGA/CGA adapter plug. I posted it to show others here what it looks like, so if they see one like it they can feel more secure in buying it knowing it is probably working okay (given it's connected to a PC in a similar way that this one was). It's good to hear that even if it produces this image while connected to a valid source, then it's fixable too.

I do wish I had a multisync monitor, but space is at a premium for me nowadays, so it will have to wait.

Some more testing

Some more testing

So I managed to do some more testing tonight.

First, I timed my 5150 doing its memory tests, and it takes about 50 seconds. This is exactly how much time the systems pauses when doing a warm boot since switching my changing EGA card configuration to connect to my 5154 monitor. So based on this, it looks like my machine is checking the system RAM when doing a warm boot. This seems very weird to me. It didn't do this before.

I booted up EGA Trek again and played with the contrast and brightness, and no luck improving the image. I've included a sample picture (#1) so you can see the boxes that have no text in them. In addition, the lines from the klingon ships to my ship normally blink on then off on my 5160, but on this setup, the lines remain (can be seen on the map on the left upper corner of screen). The colors on the screen are also off from when I run it on my 5160 with VGA Wonder.

I was able to get an Advanced Diagnostics disk version 2.25. It didn't cause the problems the diagnostic disks 1.02 or 2.02 did with the blanking out the left 1/4 of the screen on boot-up (see pic #2 below).

So I was able to get to the video testing portion of the diagnostics, and ran the "video test" and noticed that some of the screen images had a strange brighter border with the right 1/4 of the screen appearing a bit darker (sample pic #3). All of the test color screens did this, but this darking of the screen does NOT appear in any normal use.

One last test I did was the "sync test", which resulted in the 4th picture below. I don't know what the image is supposed to look like, but that is what my machine produced.

Right now, I can't figure out what problems are with the EGA cards, and what are with the 5154 monitor. Anyone have any ideas?

Hmm, I tried the sync test on my 5160 with IBM EGA+5154 and I see the same
thing as you. I'm not sure what that test is supposed to do

Also on the color tests, there is some slight variations in the color intensities across the screen.

So there may not be any real problems here, especially if this never shows up on any actual
program.

For the EGA Trek game..... just to make sure you realize that the contrast knob on the 5154
needs to be 'pulled out' before any adjustment can be made. Not sure why they used this
type of control, maybe it was so there could be one 'default' contrast setting.

OK, thanks for checking this on your system. That eases my mind a little about the monitor.

Yep, when testing EGA Trek, I did pull out the contrast knob and turned it from mininum to maximum with no change to the problem areas. The whole screen image changed as you would expect.

I still think there's something up with my EGA card, though. This is because the screen behavior is off, but on a "behavior" perspective, not an image perspective. By this I mean how some parts of the screen are off, or missing. Also, when the EGA Trek opening screen comes up, and it draws the Enterprise and a Klingon ship, and a few phaser blasts come out of the Enterprise and hit the Klingon, on this setup, the whole screen flashes red a few times, which correlate with the phaser blasts which behave correctly on my 5160 with VGA Wonder connected to this 5154.

Ok, so I was curious about the EGA Trek game and downloaded a copy.
I tried running the game on my setup, but the first screen was messed
up, with a lot of scrambled graphics. So I thought there may be an issue
with either the EGA card or the display. I removed my IBM EGA (w/256k)
and inserted another IBM EGA without the memory daughterboard.

I restarted the game and it appears to work okay now, so there may be an
issue with my other EGA card or the extra memory on the card.

When the game goes to the opening screen with the ships , the entire screen
also flashes red as you mentioned. After going through all of the initial
screens and creating a user and password, I eventually get to a screen
that looks pretty much like your first screen picture above. I tried to take
a picture but couldn't get a good result with my digital camera. If you
can give more details about whats missing from that screen I can check
on mine.

So overall sounds like your EGA card and display are working okay

I managed to take a few acceptable pictures on the cameras macro setting.

Wow, thanks for doing that.

So the pictures you took were from your EGA w/64K? Were you able to get the game to run at all with the EGA w/256K? What did it look like on the EGA w/256K?

Your pictures look exactly like on my setup, and the opening graphics sound just like mine, too.

If your pics are with the EGA w/64K, then EGA Trek looks like it's got problems running on an IBM EGA card, and worse problems running on an IBM EGA card w/256K. That totally bogus, since the game is CALLED "EGA" Trek. You'd think it would support the standard IBM EGA cards in any configuration.

The only setup that ran it properly was my 5160 + VGA Wonder with this 5154 monitor. I checked to see what DOSBOX would do with EGA Trek, and it seems to run it correctly, like on this VGA Wonder setup. The VGA Wonder does a good job of giving you the maximum screen colors/resolution that your hardware can support, beyond the standard modes. Does that mean that EGA Trek is using video memory past 256K? Seems unlikely.

That's right, the pictures I took were with the IBM EGA w/64K. I wasn't able to get the
game working with the first IBM EGA w/256K. But I have another IBM EGA w/256K
and also an ATI EGA Wonder , I'll try those later and post the results.

I would say that most likely my first IBM EGA w/256K has a problem, with either the card
or the memory board/chips.

In my first picture, should there be something in that empty blue area right above the Damage Report ?

How many graphics boards 'you got, son?

Here's a picture of EGA Trek running normally after the initial startup screen on DOSBox. The area above the "Damage Report" section is where you get real-time messages from your crew. For instance, if you press the "up" key, it will raise shields, and you'll get a message there. Each new message will scroll the previous messages down, and I believe it shows the last 3 messages.

Yeah, I do have a few graphics cards laying around , several IBM EGA , one ATI EGA Wonder , and some
other clone EGA cards.

I installed the ATI EGA Wonder and tried EGA Trek again. On the opening screen the graphics look
better (small ships) and the entire screen doesn't flash red. On the IBM card w/64k the ships filled the
entire screen and then flashed red...which just didn't seem right. But having never seen the game
on a working screen I thought it was correct. So I think there are some issues with the video memory. Also the play
screen looks just like your last picture using DosBox. The laser strength bars and numbers are displayed correctly
and the colors just look more vivid.

I then tried my other IBM EGA card w/256K. I received the same positive results as the ATI EGA Wonder except
the IBM card seemed a little bit slower drawing the graphics.

So it looks like the EGA Trek game makes some assumptions that the user has > 64K video memory.

mikey,

That sounds right. It seems like the only way to explain what we're seeing. It's faulty on both of our IBM EGAs w/64K, it didn't work on your 1st IBM EGA w/256K because of specific problems with that adapter, but it's working great on your fully functional IBM EGA w/256K, and your ATI EGA Wonder (which I assume has 256K+), and my ATI VGA Wonder (with 256K).

Thanks to you and everyone else who helped figure this out. I love this site. It would have driven me bonkers otherwise!

So my EGA card seems like it's working OK, AND my 5154 monitor seems like it's working okay. Time to celebrate!

Congrats on your 5154! I had one years ago and lost it when someone stole many items from storage.

I'm now rocking a 7534, which is the industrial version of the 5154... Pictures, here.

Holmes said:

I still think there's something up with my EGA card, though.

Click to expand...

More than once I've blamed what I thought was a display issue on the wrong source -- I've got a VGA card right now where the red signal cuts in and out regardless of monitor -- usually that's cable or plug, in this case it's a failing cap.

I've found a lot of non-IBM ega cards were prone to random oddball failures of small on-board components.