IBM AT Drive Types

[Scott Stevens]

On Thu, 7 Jul 2005 20:17:59 +0100 (BST)
ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:

> > On this topic, I recently located an original IBM Monochrome
> > monitor, so for me it's now just a matter of pulling out the EGA
> > Techref and jumpering the IBM EGA card in my AT for EGA monochrome
> > and plugging the
> 
> One thing a lot of people forget : There's a jumper on the board near
> the DE9 connector which selects where pin 2 of said DE9 goes (LSB of
> one of the colours for an EGA monitor, ground for an MDA or CGA
> monitor). If you set that to the EGA position and then connect an MDA
> (or for that matter CGA) monitor, you're shorting an output line to
> ground via the monitor cable. It probably won't do any harm, but why
> risk it...
> 
> 

Yes, if I remember correctly, there are two jumper areas on the original
EGA card that need to be moved.  I bought an EGA card years ago from a
second hand dealer and it came with the techref suppliment, which I
still have.  Thanks for reminding me to be careful and doublecheck when
I get going on that AT.

I was probably one of the few people who ran EGA-Monochrome on an XT,
back when an XT was all I could afford.  EGA-Monochrome was very well
supported in a few essential apps like Microsoft Word for DOS, and it
also gave a MUCH better video resolution for Windows 3.0 on a 9-pin mono
monitor than a Hercules card.  Back in the days when I was too cheap to
buy an expensive EGA monitor and ran Windows on an 8088 machine... 
Running EGA-monochrome kept me from wasting my time playing games, since
there was none, nadda, no support at all for gameplaying type graphics
on EGA-mono.


> -tony
>