Uncreative Labs

Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2008 10:13 am

I have just received this card from ebaY and despite jumpering information on this site ( http://www.uncreativelabs.net/hwinfo/ati.htm ) and on others sites, I simply cannot get it to work with the monitor built into my IBM Portable PC (requires composite via the internal 4 pin connector on this card). The card is generating something, however there is a problem with horizontal sync.

I have set switches 5&6 on the motherboard to on and have tried numerous configuration options over a couple of hours.

Any thoughts?

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

ega is close to hercules mono graphics
there is a switch setting on ega cards for a mono 18khz? monitor
and a setting for a cga monitoe 15.575 khz?

a hercules mono-graphics card, an ibm mono card have a sepecific setting'
a cga card has anothger setting, actually 2, one for 80x25 and another foir 40x?
neither card has a bios that must be loaded first.
an ega or vga card HAS a bios, the4 xt or pc or cloner mb must be set to ega, or if the manual was written BEFORE EGA existed, to NONE

there are some cards that have both mono-graphics and cga. -- clone cards.

Only some cga cards have a composite setting, a rca-phone-=type connector.

the RCA connector on an ega card is NOT a composite, it is a feature connector,
pc mag in a rare tech article, printed info on how to add a frequency generqator thru this connector to get a higher resolution on the screen
SO that rca plug/jack on the ega card may or likely is not a composite connrctot.

ati made many interesting cards, but ati is now part of amd and all the old info may be " long gone"

someone here may be able to help.

Posted: Sat Mar 08, 2008 10:06 pm

It looks like it was simply an address conflict. Although the firmware takes several seconds to boot on an 8088 XT and so I may have been a little too impatient on a few occasions.

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

good to hear, an adress conflict? then how are you still getting video, well kind of. when ever i had conflicts with video, A, id get the beeping noise, B, the machince doesnt evan start, or C, i get video and the other device that would conflict would not work at all, or vice versa

Posted: Mon Mar 10, 2008 12:45 pm

I don't know! I spent 2-3 hours changing switch and jumper settings with no success; finally I tried changing the address jumper once more and it worked. After a few hours, I left it at that!

It works and more importantly, this card is the only EGA card ever made which has the internal connector for the IBM Portable's internal 5" CRT monitor.

Also, as the ATI EGA Wonder has a clock on board and is not dependent on motherboard clocks, I can now used my 6MHz 80286 accelerator card in the portable!

I'm a happy camper at present! Smile

Joined: 27 Jan 2007 Posts: 274 Location: USA

and who said ebay only sells junk, i bought parts of ebay all the time, never had a dud.

Joined: 20 Jun 2006 Posts: 5

This is good info ...... I also have an ATI EGA Wonder (also bought
from eBay) and a 5155 PPC I picked up for free from my local
FreeCycle awhile back.
Smile

Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:38 pm

There were a few versions of the EGA wonder and only one has the 4 pin header for connection to the internal CRT monitor.

I Google on "ATI EGA Wonder" will produce web sites with board layouts etc for each of the versions. There should be a 5 pin light pen header in the top right hand corner and a 4 pin header for the monitor next to it.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

Very interesting. I have heard of people replacing the CGA cards in their 5155s, but I wasn't aware that the EGA Wonder was the only replacement card available.

So, I'm kind of curious about this setup. What kind of graphics modes are available when using the composite display? Are you limited to the 200 scanline modes, or can the EGA wonder do some fancy interlacing tricks to get 400 lines out of it? The EGA Wonder is a pretty nifty card. It supports VGA Modes 11 and 12, and allows for some really crazy extended resolutions.

Joined: 03 Feb 2006 Posts: 488 Location: pennsylvanai

the cga monitor is pretty limited and the BOX that forms the characters is limiter, I think, to an 8 x 8 box.
However you can set ega card / cga monitor
and get 16 colors the terrible blues ( cyan) and washed out red ( magenta) are replaced with a real red and blue.
Many games will pick this up with no changes..
but the dot pitch of the cga monitor is still very coarse and grainy. and is not as smooth as a ega or vga monitor.
the ibm vga card is a long and skinny card hard to find
try an older ISA vga card, do not let the "extra fingers" short out.
remember 2 thinbgs must be met,
1) set switches to ega or no video ( same setting)
2) an original PC system must have a bios that can see a hard drive ( bios extensions) required for ega, vga, or a hard drive card.

Joined: 19 Apr 2006 Posts: 261 Location: WisConSin

Hmm, EGA with composite opens up a lot of possibilities if the composite is implemented correctly.

My futura sends out 64 column text @ 512x480 to a composite screen (1 BNC connector, not RCA)

Luckily when it comes to composite you can send any resolution to the interleave and still view it even if the screen doesn't show all the resolution

You can view 80 column text on a standard NTSC RCA composite screen but it kills your eyes, standard composite is 320x400 max (some very poorly made screens can't even do 320 lines but generally they all get the verticle res)
A high quality RCA composite screen can take 440-480 lines of horizontal res. and 400-483 lines of verticle res usually you need a BNC connector to get above 440 lines of resolution either direction unless you have a very good card and very good monitor.

I think he could technically run any resolution he wants in the setup, I am curious if the card will let him or if it locks in to only 40 column modes. I used to set CGA cards to 80 column on composite screens just so everything would work OK, but when it went to 80 column you sometimes had to guess what a character was because the screen wasn't always clear enough.

Let us know what your setup will do!

Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2008 2:07 am

Does anyone have a PDF manual and the driver disk for this card?

I have layout and jumpers etc, however I would love a copy of the original manual and disk.

Joined: 20 Nov 2004 Posts: 589 Location: Shandong, China

I'd like to have this too.