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16-bit VGA card recommendation?

1

1200XL M.U.L.E.

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May 9, 2021
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I will be receiving a 286 machine soon. It has an EGA card installed but I don't have an EGA monitor. I want to shop around for a 16-bit VGA card while I wait for the machine to arrive.

The last VGA card I bought was for my Epson Equity 1+ and I was looking for a card with an 8-bit bus card edge. With that being somewhat rare, I bought what I could find.

Now I have a whole lot more to choose from but I cannot what remember was considered good and bad back in the 80s and 90s. I remember I had a Trident SVGA card of some kind. These seem plentiful on eBay.

I intend to run Windows and maybe some light gaming.

Should I just go with another Trident card or should I look at something else?

Thanks!
 
It's all personal preference, I arode ATI VGA Wonder series, and have almost all models, except VIP. If you where on a 386 or 486 with ISA only, I would recommend Tseng ET4000AX, as it was a demo scene standard around 1992-1993, but for 286, anything is fine, as long as there are no vertical bars on LCD monitors. For example, all ATI cards I own have no bars, all Realtek cards I own do have them, and for Trident, half have and half don't. If you plan to use your 286 with a CRT monitor, you don't have to worry about vertical bars.
 
Thanks for your quick reply, @dhau !

I will be trying to use this machine with a CRT. The machine is an Epson Equity II+ and the CRT, coming separately from another seller, is an Epson branded VGA monitor.

So it sounds like anything goes, then? Should I worry about video driver availability for Windows?

Thanks!
 
People give them a lot of grief, but I’m pretty happy with my Oak OTI-077 cards. Granted it’s probably in large part because I was able to get five of them for $20. (Sold as flakey/not working, but reseating the socketed DAC and ROM chips fixed them all.)
 
I bought a similar lot from Texelec and I’ve had no issues with mine either. I’m using one in a 286.

Have you tried them in an XT class? I keep forgetting to see if they will work as 8 bit cards.
 
jafir said:
I bought a similar lot from Texelec and I’ve had no issues with mine either. I’m using one in a 286.

Have you tried them in an XT class? I keep forgetting to see if they will work as 8 bit cards.
Click to expand...

Yep, same deal. Like I said, only two worked right away in my batch, but a little TLC got them all running.

And yeah, they definitely work on an 8-bit bus at least. The reason I bought them was to try the unholy experiment of hanging VGA off of a Tandy 1000 HX motherboard. (And they work great, the resulting abomination is my retro daily driver.) The only thing I don’t know is if they’re 8088 compatible, my Tandy has a V-20 and I’m way too lazy to swap chips to find out. It would be good to know.
 
For a 286, you can use pretty much any 16-bit VGA card. I often see people wasting very fast cards in such systems. Just don't do that.

I have one 286 with a ATI VGA Wonder-16, and one with a Trident TVGA9000. Both can run any game targeted for a 286 just fine with no issues. The Trident has vertical bars on a TFT, but if you use a CRT, that does not matter either.
 
What causes these vertical bars? I have never seen this before.

I connect my Epson Equity 1+ with it's 8-bit VGA card to a NEC flat panel display. There are no vertical bars to be seen.
 
I personally highly rate the earlier Cirrus Logic cards such as those with the CL-GD510/520 chipset. These are often found in 8-bit ISA form as well as 16-bit.
Many have both the 15-pin VGA/SVGA analogue monitor port as well as the older 9-pin digital out for Hercules, CGA and EGA. I used to run one of the 8-bit variants of this on my XT, 286 and 386, and I've rarely come across a chipset that is more hardware / register-compatible with all the video standards.
Graphics performance is not an issue on a 286 anyway - it's all about compatibility.
 
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