daver@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (David Ruby) (03/10/91)
I have been using a Samsung (CD-1464/W) color monitor that I bought used with my cga system. I was given an old ibm ega card (64k), and according to the ibm reference manual, you can set the jumpers and switches so that it will do CGA (or so I thought). With this knowledge, I put the card in, set the jumpers to the cga settings, and figured that I would see cga graphics from my ega card, and then someday, I'd buy an ega monitor and set the switches for it later. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that my monitor was displaying EGA graphics! Games designed for ega looked great! Unfortunatly, when I returned to the text screen, and did anything heavily text oriented like "dir", random inversed characters would appear on the screen. Eventually, if I did this a lot, the whole screen would have "$" across it and the machine would lock up. In addition to that, the '286 I was using it on, stopped recognizing the fact that my hard drive existed. When I took out the ega card, it recognized the hard drive like normal. I thought that maybe it was something with my '286, and plugged it into my xt clone. This time, the machine the xt decided it only had 256k of memory instead of 512. I borrowed another ega card to check if my ega card was bad, but it did the same thing on the '286 as before. So, why did this happen? Actually, why did my previously cga monitor decide to show ega graphics? Are all cga monitors capable of this? or just the Samsung CD-1464's? Is there something I have to do with the computers before installing an ega card? I ran setup on my `286, and set the jumper to "color", but I still get this problem. I am totally baffled as to why the ega card would block off the other 256k of memory on my xt, any hints? Would this problem go away if I got an official ega monitor? Why? Can I set my card to something so that I can plug in my cga monitor and run things until I get an ega monitor? ---------- David Ruby daver@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu University of Illinois "This calls for a special blend of psychology and extreme violence" vyvyan