There was also the VTECH CGA/MDA card they bundled with many of their clones also does color while in the MDA mode. I'm quite sure it came out after these Tandy cards though. I made a video showing off the color MDA modes and the hidden Plantronics 16 color mode in the second channel video titled 'This clone CGA/MDA card has a couple of surprising hidden features' on the second channel. I'll pick up that CM-1 monitor and see if I can find anything to drive it with. It seems to be using the same scan rate as the NEC PC-9801 machines which might be where Tandy got the specs from (and the monitor was already made, just rebadge it as a Tandy monitor CM1)
Fun Fact about the fate of the Tandy 2000 Almost Every Radio Shack store had one on display, but very few were actually sold. Around the time the Tandy 1000 came out, they took all the 2000's and moved them to the back room for the daily Sales report, and Inventory control. They used a modem (1200? 2400?) to report back to the "Mother Ship". I worked at several stores, mainly to pay for college, and was amazed on how well this old boat anchor worked, every day, for years on end. Sure the 80186 was well obsolete, and about the only software that worked was written by Tandy, but it was "the old mare that got the job done" Not sure, but Radio Shack might have been the first Nation Wide outlet to have Daily Sales reports at Corporate Office.... because of excess obsolete invetory!
I have heard the same story about the original TRS80. Make one for each store and they will still be useful even if nobody buys one. Unlike the "Executive Decision Maker" gadget I seem to recall in one of the catalogues.
3:00 Fun Fact: That is the same STB Systems that was purchased in 1998/99 by 3dfx, the former's acquisition being one of the reasons for the latter's downfall.
Actually such a product makes sense. Since on the PC you can have one colour and mone monochrome adapter installed in parallel, some software used this to be able to have a dual-screen mode. For example AFAIK Borland Pascal allowed you to have the debugger on one screen and the program output on the other screen. Having that in colour certainly has some advantages.
Given how many people lived in Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and Turbo Whatever IDEs, text-only was perfectly fine. And having color would be nice. Essential? No. But welcome. I could definitely see this as a stop-gap, if you were torn between outfitting a workstation with an inexpensive MDA card and mono monitor, or wanted to "future-proof" your investment with a high-res color monitor and be able to take advantage of it until EGA became affordable. ... and then VGA came out and flipped the table anyway, so, meh.. Hindsight's 20/20.
Yes, Borland's Turbo Debugger supported running on a secondary monochrome card. It would probably also be able to output in color on this one, because - fun fact - the MDA standard actually was originally designed to also support colors, and hence it's no problem for programs to output colors on such cards. Adrian tested such a card, quite an interesting video.
Back in the 1990s I bought a heavily used cube style multisync monitor. I'm pretty sure I know where the large quantity being sold came from as on a TV programme about the City of London I noted each trader had about six of them. Using colour to show, at a glance, which stocks were up and which were down would be extremely useful. Likewise any process control situation such as a power station.
Even if you're not running dual monitor, there are plenty of programs (particularly in the mid-80s, but even today) that take quite good advantage of having colour available for text. Spending $750 for a colour monitor and DTDA is not a huge savings over $1000 for a colour monitor and a DGDA, but if you have no need for graphics, it's still $250 to spend on something else.
Early MDA cards secretly worked in color as well, but use MDA timings for it. Ironically enough, IBM's later revision of the MDA card removed this ability entirely so it was then purely monochrome only. But the early models absolutely did have color onboard.
Huh? I hadn't heard this. Say more. :-) I have a 5150 with primary MDA and secondary CGA, and a 5160 with primary CGA and secondary MDA. I'm curious if either of them have this secret color mode, how to tell, and how to use it?
@@nickwallette6201 I have heard similar. If you didn't have a monitor compatible with the higher scan rate, an oscilloscope would let you see the activity on the color lines.
Interesting note about the resolution and scan rate: 640x400 and 24/25 kHz saw much more use over in Japan, where the higher resolution proved useful for the display of Japanese text. Thus there's various Japanese systems that use that resolution, most notably NEC's PC-98 line.
in case you want to go down the rabbit hole of "hires text": During early SVGA times (800x600) some cards had character roms, to do DOS-text-mode80x25 with physical resolution of 800x600, with very high resolution font-roms.
@@SharreIWright I continued to use Ceefax long after getting the internet, That was a bit limited with a 14K4 dial up modem and a bundle of 8 hours usage a month !
That biggest bodge wire you've ever seen is a shielded coaxial cable. They did have some problem with some kind of noise feeding into the signal path there.
Thanks for the memories. I worked at Tandy's in Australia from 1983 to 1986 as a teenager. Great times and Tandy paid 10% commission to junior staff for each sale. :)
Awesome video!! Makes me want to type up a document in WordPerfect on a nice crisp MDA CRT (or at least watch someone do it and gently fall asleep to it)
Text-only but with color... I wonder if any code editors of the time could take advantage of that. Syntax highlighting is a pretty great quality-of-life feature.
In the early 1980s, the German company with the most German name imaginable, Triumph Adler, was pretty successful with their CP/M compatible PC range. In 1985, they released one of those not-quite-IBM-compatibles that ran MS-DOS 2.11. This machine has the computer-in-the-keyboard form factor, but it still uses plug-in graphics cards. AFAIK, there were three: A BTX card (which, since this model flopped thunderously, ended up saving it as the Deutsche Post tried out BTX phone booths - it's like a one-person internet cafe, but in 1985), a color text card and a hi-res graphics card (says 512x256 at 16 colors on the box). The color text card does 80x25 in 8 colors. No graphics. The most outstanding feature of this computer? It doesn't have a backspace key. And the Del key is a secondary function you can't count on working. So if you mistype, power off, power on, start over. (btw. it's the Triumph Adler PC 16. Surficially it looks like a Triumph Adler PC, but that ran CP/M and while it also doesn't have backspace, it has an INS/DEL key which back in the day *was* backspace, it's in a weird spot)
@@dyter424 They used to make typewriters eons ago. In the very late 70s/early 80s, they had a range of CP/M machines (alphatronic PC). You probably haven't heard of the Olympia Boss or Olympia People Computer. As opposed to the TA machines, the Olympia PCs are insanely rare, especially for something that was supposedly mass produced. But at least these machines have a backspace key. (Olympia is another German typewriter company who started making PCs at the very late 70s.)
Really cool to see those text-based action games (rather than just text adventures). I don't think I've seen anything like that for IBM PC-compatible machines before but it makes sense they exist. The Pac-Man game is a lot like a Commodore PET game I've played, and that Viper is really neat to use colour ASCII (or is it ANSI?).
That shareware catalogue brought back memories of ordering games when I was using Windows 3.1 and the early years of Windows 95. Sometimes, you can trade software as well. The shareware catalogues was your best friend back in the days before the internet became widespread.
Someone I know paid for his £600 external SCSI CD ROM by running a Shareware library, buying CDs of shareware from the USA at about £30 a CD then re-selling it on floppies at £1 a program..
It's amazing that the text objects can have bits blown off. That some really creative use of the text characters, including the smoke. Also it probably runs incredibly fast on an 8088 if it's not using BIOS for the display.
Was 'Viper' used for a lot of shooter games like this back in the 80s? I remember seeing the only game ever released for the very rare Mindset computer was a shooter called Vyper. Seems like they had different developers though, probably just a coincidence.
@@lemagreengreen The fighters in Battlestar Galactica (released in 1979) were called Vipers. I'm guessing different shareware programers borrowed that name for their little fighter ships.
I suspect -- and am quite surprised to see -- that your NEC LCD panel is actually decoding the TTL signals, but it's not picking up the intensity bit for the other eight colors. (I'm guessing that 9 to 15 pin cable is just a passive adapter, and not doing any translation.) I may have to try that on a similarly aged NEC LCD. Being able to finally use my EGA card would be great. I do still want an EGA monitor, though.
Must be some magic. I was also amazed to see it produce an image. That is definitely a cable I have never seen before. Maybe my NEC 14" multisync with analog/ttl switch had something like it. I think it just had a DB9 though and needed some adapter for VGA. Too bad it died a fiery death.
Yes, it will do EGA, but only in 8 colors. There is a way to convert 16-color RGBI to analog RGB with a resistor network, but EGA adds extra complexity with the secondary RGB pins it uses to get a palette of 64 colors. Back in the day there were lots of complaints of these extra colors not working properly even if you did have an EGA monitor, so that was one of the reasons why IBM switched to analog RGB for VGA.
@@vwestlife So it's missing the logic or pins (2, 6 and 7) for the intensity channels? So it would look just like with a CGA cable/monitor. Confusing. But wouldn't it still be digital/TTL? Also it's strange that the colors aren't all wonky like with a CGA monitor. I still suspect some NEC multisync magic. ;)
That would make for a fantastic secondary display for a PC used for development. We all know that graphics displays and text mode use different regions of memory, so you can have two separate cards for each to have two monitors even on the oldest IBM PCs.
4:45 I'm not sure I agree with this conclusion. One can make capable text-mode-based UI applications, where color-coding can improve efficiency or draw immediate attention to a status, e.g. in real-time monitoring, which I'm sure existed in the mid-eighties. Perhaps a niche use, but if a monitor pops up, say, a bright red window with yellow blinking text, you're quite likely to quickly spot that from a distance, even if you're not directly looking at it.
Yes this would be very useful for something like financial data displayed on the screen. Even today anyone who uses Linux terminal can tell you colored text is a useful feature as it gives context to the information being displayed.
@@kumarp3074 Back in the 1980s stockbrokers in London had about six colour text monitors each. In the 1990s I bought a used multisync monitor that had been used for something like that as it had bad screen burn (and a price that reflected that). p.s. watch the first few seconds of "Black Wednesday (BBC 1997)" here on RUclips to see how many monitors a currency trader needed back in the early 1990s.
I can't possibly imagine it had anything in common with the Trash Eighty... That's some lovely colors, and a nice collection of DOS utilities. That text mode Pacman reminds me of the version I played on a 286 XT in the early '90s. Not sure if that was the same as here.
Wow, Poke-Man is a blast from the past. It came installed on a turbo XT I was given when I was in high school. I remember it ran too fast at 8MHz on that thing, too.
Did you try running either card in your NCR without disabling its onboard VGA? There's a good chance it would work, providing a DTDA occupied only MDA address space (0xB0000-B7FFF frame buffer & 0x3B0-3BF I/O). CGA was B8000-BFFFF & 0x3D0-3DF. EGA & VGA were usually the same, plus extra space for their new modes, but still left the MDA ranges clear. I ran dual-headed ISA MDA + VLB SVGA for a while under Linux, with a hacked video driver to allow a text console to remain active on the mono monitor alongside a color X11 desktop. Very handy! This was before any other multi-monitor setup was supported on mainstream PCs. With VGA still enabled, your NCR's mono/color jumper would probably have determined which monitor was used to boot, after which MODE MONO / MODE CO80 could switch between them in DOS.
This looks like the perfect card to play ZZT, the Kroz games, and a ton of classic roguelikes, alongside the text adventures you mentioned. I wonder if any games apart from Nibbles used 80x50 pseudo graphics using the half-height block characters.
I didn't expect this video to go so fast! I guess that means it was interesting :D. ...and I forgot all about the Pac-Man clone Poke-man, I can't remember where I saw and played it, but I vaguely remember it.
@08:40 Oh come on VWestlife! It's only 2400 Miles! 🙂 That would mean i have to refill my tank about 13 times to get there and back (625km or 388mi per tank, a bit lower than the actual range). Also it would take about 48 Hours to get there and the same Amount to get back (at 80km/h or 50mi/h average speed). Quite a ride for a monitor.... AND: Nice Video as always! Thanks!
@@nickwallette6201 That depends on what Regular Gasoline costs in the USA at the moment and what Service Costs (Repairs, Maintenance) i would generate by driving that distance with my 34 year old car...
Quite a ride for a monitor.... especially one that doesn't work. I did have someone do a 400 mile round trip to get a monitor I was selling "collect only" but that was a working 20" Dell Trinitron.
Interesting, can't say I'd ever heard of a 25khz monitor, it makes me wonder if they're possibly the same as the 24khz "medium res"(508x381) tubes used on arcade machines in the mid to late '90s, but just driven differently. Those used analogue RGB, as I imagine folks would suspect.
LOL at that bodge wire. I guess they used up the jumper cables from everyone's vehicle emergency kit, and the only thing they had available was spare cable from the power supply harnesses. It'll do, I suppose. hahaha!
My NCR PC4i has a Mitsubishi 25kHz color monitor in it. Its sharpness and resolution is sooo much better than an IBM CGA monitor. Interesting that Mitsu monitor you have supports the NGA graphics mode! It would be nice to pair with a PC6... if any still exist...
I don't really think so. Blue just happens to be a nice contrasting color against a white background without being too garish, and also making them underlined (which most web browsers don't do anymore) makes the links visible on a monochrome monitor.
IIRC the flashing is actually set by sending a special character to the screen, and turned off with another or the same character. I believe you could make just a section of text flash and the card does that without needing to tell it to redraw everything. PS It's a bit more complicated than just sending a character. *Here it is according to CHATGPT:* "In text mode, each character on the screen is represented by a byte for the character itself and another byte for the attribute, which controls the text's color, background, and other effects like blinking. The attribute byte is structured as follows (for 16-color text modes): Bits 0-3: Foreground color Bits 4-6: Background color Bit 7: Blinking/Intensity bit If Bit 7 is set to 1, the text will blink."
the Commodore AGA card in the PC10-II line had quirk in the other direction. CGA (320x200) with additional 16 colors instead of 4 and 640x200 with 4 or 16 colors instead of 2, it was somewhat compatible with Plantronics cards. But it had not better Text color modes (but at least MDA with a 132 column mode)... and yes, all with the same monitor, which was not multisync.
It's good so many companies thought about needing to override the monochrome setting. Probably various examples of quirky graphics cards. Wonder if there's a way to temporarily trick a program in to reading that it's color and then setting it back to prevent breakage and get some more software working in color. What about something like epic games' ZZT?
It would have been neat to see what happened if you tried to run a 40-column game, such as the (in)famous Castle Adventure. Despite its bugginess, it's my personal go-to for testing 40-column modes. There were plenty of other 40-column games from the 80s, though!
I was a huge fan of text-mode color "graphics" back in the day. If you're stuck with only CGA for a long time, the best games are the ones that run in CGA (hi-res) monochrome, or 16-color text. that 4-color garbage was almost never worth it
Certainly is quite the mashup of standards, which I suppose at the time were barely considered to be "standard", but I suppose of all you needed was to see what you were doing, then it did the job, kind of like the old NHS glasses we used to have back in the day, cheap & ugly, but worked... :P
This doesn’t seem to be the reason - seems like blue hyperlinks started in 93. There’s a great article if you search “why are hyperlinks blue.” I wouldn’t have read it without your suggestion here! Thank you.
There's an article on Mozilla's blog, "Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue", that tells the story of blue hyperlinks. The basic takeaway is that shades of blue make for a visible accept but are unobtrusive, both on dark and light backgrounds - compared to, say, red, which is too flashy. So it had more to do with psychology than with technology. Also, the modern web started on NeXT computers, which were monochrome at the time (so first hyperlinks were _just_ underlined), and then developed on various UNIX workstations. Mainstream platforms like Windows and Mac came a bit later - moreover, the early instances of hyperlink-like concepts in the PC world were actually green - that's how links were shown in Windows 3.x help files; DOS 6 help hyperlinks were monochrome but marked with green semigraphics. So... your theory is interesting, but I find it unlikely.
that lcd monitor could likely be made to display all colours google 'cga to scart' adaptor, theres some diy circuits, they could likely be adapted for it as they convert rgb plus intensity digital to rgb analogue ..??
@00:23 When you look at the comparison chart between the Tandy and the IBM, you see that Big Blue offers a computer that will work... barely, with stripped down peripherals. The demos you would see, just like when you buy a newly built house, are with all the periherals and trinkets thrown in: max RAM, top tier everything, etc.... Nothing has changed in over 40 years: if you want to buy a Macintosh laptop or desktop, the lowest price posted will give you a working computer, but with bare bones capability, and if you want it to run "fast", then you have to buy the extra ram, storeage, more CPUs, etc... IBM and Apple have excelled in ripping off their customers by overcharging them and then making them buy the whole equipment all over again in a few years when they become "obsolete" and neither support nor parts are available anywhere.
That's only _somewhat_ true of modern day Apple. 1980s IBM was selling computers without a video adapter, without an operating system, without any IO, and with just one floppy drive in an outdated standard. If you buy the cheapest MacBook today... yes, it has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which are rather laughable in this day and age, but it is actually usable. It has an OS, it can connect to the Internet out of the box, and despite the specs are very modest, it will do just about everything you'd expect a computer to do. Yes, Apple's upgrade pricing is abysmal. But it is a difference between not having a usable computer at the base price, and actually having one.
You said to display underline on MDA, you tell it display blue. Is there a similar method for blink or reverse text, is there a color you tell it it to display for each of those? Also, some early MDA cards were wired for color. Do those also show the underline text as blue when attached to an appropriate monitor?
Only underlined text is set by choosing a color on MDA. Blinking is a separate attribute that works on either color or monochrome, just like inverse video.
@@jafirelkurd AFAIR blinking is the same attribute as background color intensity, i.e. if you set the background to e.g light green, it will actually be dark green, but the foreground will blink. I'm pretty sure there's a way to force light background colors instead, at least on VGA and beyond, but that's how it works by default.
I can't help but wonder if this is actually an MDA clone. Very early MDA cards actually had undocumented support for color, and I wonder if this works in the same way.
"non-standard" mean IBM compactivity, there was no "standard" at all. Botth IBM and TANDY was save lot of money it there was sit in same table, and make one.
dude color is useful even if there aren't graphics. dumb terminals used color and zero graphics A LOT, so I don't know why you say "if you don't need graphics, you probably don't need color" because that is just not even remotely based on reality - at least not the reality that most of us inhabit.
First.. rude. Second, untrue. Mono displays were used right up until (and for some, throughout) the 90s, when color was absolutely available and not wildly expensive. It just wasn't that critical for lots of ordinary tasks. Think about it: * Word processing. You really need 80x25, but not graphics, and not color. You're either going to send as TXT or print in mono anyway. * Spreadsheets. Same. If you really need charts and graphs, then Hercules is plenty. Again, if you're printing, then you're probably doing it in mono. If you're really REALLY fancy, _maybe_ you send a job to the local print house to make slides in color. Then, it would be _nice_ to have CGA modes, but not strictly necessary, and that would only net you 4 colors anyway. * Presentations. You need graphics, but not necessarily color. If you're printing, mono is plenty fine. If you're making slides, it's the same deal as above -- color would be nice, but at this point, your options are still limited anyway. * Desktop Publishing. Graphics, in mono. See: Macintosh, which was the reigning king of this market for years, for exactly this reason. Affordable graphics, for a workflow that was going to yield mono prints anyway, most of the time. (Color DTP was very expensive, and very slow, but if you really needed it, there were boutique products to upgrade a Mac with the necessary hardware.) * Coding. Just need text. 80x25, preferably. Nobody's doing colored syntax highlighting at this point. * CAD. Must have graphics. More speed, more pixels, but color is a luxury that few need. * Terminals (as you said). The majority of this was text-only, mono-only. Yeah, there's color now. However, as much as I live in CLI land, about the only thing I do that has color text in a terminal window is colorized 'ls'. Maybe the odd code fix in nano/vim with syntax highlighting. But again -- that's a very 2005+ thing to have. Nobody was thinking about this in the 80s. * Games. Text adventures just need mono text. Graphical games will be designed for Hercules or CGA. In none of those scenarios are you at a point where need text, but not graphics, but you do need color. The only scenario I can envision where it makes sense is if you have the budget to upgrade either the monitor OR the card, but not both at the same time, and you want to have an upgrade path in the future that takes advantage of your investment. In that case, color monitor today, text card now, graphics card later.
At work in 1981 we had a full blown Tandy TRS80 system with all the accessories like disc drives. They employed a guy as "the computer operator" to use it.
There was also the VTECH CGA/MDA card they bundled with many of their clones also does color while in the MDA mode. I'm quite sure it came out after these Tandy cards though. I made a video showing off the color MDA modes and the hidden Plantronics 16 color mode in the second channel video titled 'This clone CGA/MDA card has a couple of surprising hidden features' on the second channel. I'll pick up that CM-1 monitor and see if I can find anything to drive it with. It seems to be using the same scan rate as the NEC PC-9801 machines which might be where Tandy got the specs from (and the monitor was already made, just rebadge it as a Tandy monitor CM1)
Thanks! The DTDA is yours if you want it.
Fun Fact about the fate of the Tandy 2000
Almost Every Radio Shack store had one on display, but very few were actually sold. Around the time the Tandy 1000 came out, they took all the 2000's and moved them to the back room for the daily Sales report, and Inventory control. They used a modem (1200? 2400?) to report back to the "Mother Ship".
I worked at several stores, mainly to pay for college, and was amazed on how well this old boat anchor worked, every day, for years on end. Sure the 80186 was well obsolete, and about the only software that worked was written by Tandy, but it was "the old mare that got the job done"
Not sure, but Radio Shack might have been the first Nation Wide outlet to have Daily Sales reports at Corporate Office.... because of excess obsolete invetory!
I have heard the same story about the original TRS80. Make one for each store and they will still be useful even if nobody buys one. Unlike the "Executive Decision Maker" gadget I seem to recall in one of the catalogues.
100% True! (RS "veteran" myself!)
3:00 Fun Fact: That is the same STB Systems that was purchased in 1998/99 by 3dfx, the former's acquisition being one of the reasons for the latter's downfall.
Actually such a product makes sense. Since on the PC you can have one colour and mone monochrome adapter installed in parallel, some software used this to be able to have a dual-screen mode. For example AFAIK Borland Pascal allowed you to have the debugger on one screen and the program output on the other screen. Having that in colour certainly has some advantages.
Given how many people lived in Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, dBase, and Turbo Whatever IDEs, text-only was perfectly fine. And having color would be nice. Essential? No. But welcome.
I could definitely see this as a stop-gap, if you were torn between outfitting a workstation with an inexpensive MDA card and mono monitor, or wanted to "future-proof" your investment with a high-res color monitor and be able to take advantage of it until EGA became affordable.
... and then VGA came out and flipped the table anyway, so, meh.. Hindsight's 20/20.
Yes, Borland's Turbo Debugger supported running on a secondary monochrome card. It would probably also be able to output in color on this one, because - fun fact - the MDA standard actually was originally designed to also support colors, and hence it's no problem for programs to output colors on such cards. Adrian tested such a card, quite an interesting video.
Back in the 1990s I bought a heavily used cube style multisync monitor. I'm pretty sure I know where the large quantity being sold came from as on a TV programme about the City of London I noted each trader had about six of them. Using colour to show, at a glance, which stocks were up and which were down would be extremely useful. Likewise any process control situation such as a power station.
@@MrDuncl Green for up, red for down
Even if you're not running dual monitor, there are plenty of programs (particularly in the mid-80s, but even today) that take quite good advantage of having colour available for text. Spending $750 for a colour monitor and DTDA is not a huge savings over $1000 for a colour monitor and a DGDA, but if you have no need for graphics, it's still $250 to spend on something else.
Early MDA cards secretly worked in color as well, but use MDA timings for it. Ironically enough, IBM's later revision of the MDA card removed this ability entirely so it was then purely monochrome only. But the early models absolutely did have color onboard.
Huh? I hadn't heard this. Say more. :-)
I have a 5150 with primary MDA and secondary CGA, and a 5160 with primary CGA and secondary MDA. I'm curious if either of them have this secret color mode, how to tell, and how to use it?
@@nickwallette6201 Just Google for: "IBM MDA has color" and you'll find many results regarding this.
@@nickwallette6201 I have heard similar. If you didn't have a monitor compatible with the higher scan rate, an oscilloscope would let you see the activity on the color lines.
I think TubeTime demonstrated this a couple of years ago.
@@root42good old TubeTime!
Interesting note about the resolution and scan rate:
640x400 and 24/25 kHz saw much more use over in Japan, where the higher resolution proved useful for the display of Japanese text.
Thus there's various Japanese systems that use that resolution, most notably NEC's PC-98 line.
in case you want to go down the rabbit hole of "hires text": During early SVGA times (800x600) some cards had character roms, to do DOS-text-mode80x25 with physical resolution of 800x600, with very high resolution font-roms.
Thought I was looking at Ceefax from the thumbnail
would have been a perfect Ceefax terminal!
I want to play Bamboozle again. Even though it was ITV
That takes me back, it was our Internet before....the internet
@@SharreIWright I continued to use Ceefax long after getting the internet, That was a bit limited with a 14K4 dial up modem and a bundle of 8 hours usage a month !
That biggest bodge wire you've ever seen is a shielded coaxial cable. They did have some problem with some kind of noise feeding into the signal path there.
Thanks for the memories. I worked at Tandy's in Australia from 1983 to 1986 as a teenager. Great times and Tandy paid 10% commission to junior staff for each sale. :)
Awesome video!! Makes me want to type up a document in WordPerfect on a nice crisp MDA CRT (or at least watch someone do it and gently fall asleep to it)
Text-only but with color... I wonder if any code editors of the time could take advantage of that. Syntax highlighting is a pretty great quality-of-life feature.
Very interesting and hey, #SepTandy video! It isn't as popular to do that as it was a few years ago, so thank you.
That was very interesting. Brought back memories. Thanks!
In the early 1980s, the German company with the most German name imaginable, Triumph Adler, was pretty successful with their CP/M compatible PC range.
In 1985, they released one of those not-quite-IBM-compatibles that ran MS-DOS 2.11. This machine has the computer-in-the-keyboard form factor, but it still uses plug-in graphics cards. AFAIK, there were three: A BTX card (which, since this model flopped thunderously, ended up saving it as the Deutsche Post tried out BTX phone booths - it's like a one-person internet cafe, but in 1985), a color text card and a hi-res graphics card (says 512x256 at 16 colors on the box). The color text card does 80x25 in 8 colors. No graphics.
The most outstanding feature of this computer? It doesn't have a backspace key. And the Del key is a secondary function you can't count on working. So if you mistype, power off, power on, start over.
(btw. it's the Triumph Adler PC 16. Surficially it looks like a Triumph Adler PC, but that ran CP/M and while it also doesn't have backspace, it has an INS/DEL key which back in the day *was* backspace, it's in a weird spot)
TA used to make computers? I only know that name because of their copiers, which are rebadged Kyoceras.
@@dyter424 They used to make typewriters eons ago. In the very late 70s/early 80s, they had a range of CP/M machines (alphatronic PC).
You probably haven't heard of the Olympia Boss or Olympia People Computer. As opposed to the TA machines, the Olympia PCs are insanely rare, especially for something that was supposedly mass produced. But at least these machines have a backspace key.
(Olympia is another German typewriter company who started making PCs at the very late 70s.)
Make friends with Adrian Black and maybe he'll pick up that monitor in Portland and do a repair video.
He does watch my videos, so maybe he will.
UPDATE: Yes, Adrian's doing just that! 🙂👍
He's a guest at portland retro this weekend, he might be able to get it if it's still available by then
Really cool to see those text-based action games (rather than just text adventures). I don't think I've seen anything like that for IBM PC-compatible machines before but it makes sense they exist. The Pac-Man game is a lot like a Commodore PET game I've played, and that Viper is really neat to use colour ASCII (or is it ANSI?).
I just have to give props for speaking not too fast but also not too slow. One of the few You Tubes I can watch without setting the speed at 2x.
That shareware catalogue brought back memories of ordering games when I was using Windows 3.1 and the early years of Windows 95. Sometimes, you can trade software as well. The shareware catalogues was your best friend back in the days before the internet became widespread.
Someone I know paid for his £600 external SCSI CD ROM by running a Shareware library, buying CDs of shareware from the USA at about £30 a CD then re-selling it on floppies at £1 a program..
These are fascinating, but really make me appreciate how standardized things are now. "Does it fit, or is there an adapter? Then it works."
19:10 oh neat, that Viper game is pretty cool!
It's amazing that the text objects can have bits blown off. That some really creative use of the text characters, including the smoke.
Also it probably runs incredibly fast on an 8088 if it's not using BIOS for the display.
Was 'Viper' used for a lot of shooter games like this back in the 80s? I remember seeing the only game ever released for the very rare Mindset computer was a shooter called Vyper. Seems like they had different developers though, probably just a coincidence.
@@lemagreengreen The fighters in Battlestar Galactica (released in 1979) were called Vipers. I'm guessing different shareware programers borrowed that name for their little fighter ships.
@@DaveMcAnulty Ahh that will be it!
I suspect -- and am quite surprised to see -- that your NEC LCD panel is actually decoding the TTL signals, but it's not picking up the intensity bit for the other eight colors. (I'm guessing that 9 to 15 pin cable is just a passive adapter, and not doing any translation.)
I may have to try that on a similarly aged NEC LCD. Being able to finally use my EGA card would be great. I do still want an EGA monitor, though.
Must be some magic. I was also amazed to see it produce an image. That is definitely a cable I have never seen before. Maybe my NEC 14" multisync with analog/ttl switch had something like it. I think it just had a DB9 though and needed some adapter for VGA. Too bad it died a fiery death.
Yes, it will do EGA, but only in 8 colors. There is a way to convert 16-color RGBI to analog RGB with a resistor network, but EGA adds extra complexity with the secondary RGB pins it uses to get a palette of 64 colors. Back in the day there were lots of complaints of these extra colors not working properly even if you did have an EGA monitor, so that was one of the reasons why IBM switched to analog RGB for VGA.
@@vwestlife So it's missing the logic or pins (2, 6 and 7) for the intensity channels? So it would look just like with a CGA cable/monitor. Confusing.
But wouldn't it still be digital/TTL? Also it's strange that the colors aren't all wonky like with a CGA monitor.
I still suspect some NEC multisync magic. ;)
BBS ANSI graphics prove that a nice 80x25 full-color text mode has quite a bit of value.
That would make for a fantastic secondary display for a PC used for development. We all know that graphics displays and text mode use different regions of memory, so you can have two separate cards for each to have two monitors even on the oldest IBM PCs.
excellent video kevin....i love that mitsubishi monitor...
thanks for your video(s) to keep me company while I'm working. I might have to try one of those 9 to 15 pin cables to test my CGA card...
Very cool! Congrats on being the first to get one on RUclips. 😎
4:45 I'm not sure I agree with this conclusion. One can make capable text-mode-based UI applications, where color-coding can improve efficiency or draw immediate attention to a status, e.g. in real-time monitoring, which I'm sure existed in the mid-eighties. Perhaps a niche use, but if a monitor pops up, say, a bright red window with yellow blinking text, you're quite likely to quickly spot that from a distance, even if you're not directly looking at it.
Yes this would be very useful for something like financial data displayed on the screen. Even today anyone who uses Linux terminal can tell you colored text is a useful feature as it gives context to the information being displayed.
@@kumarp3074 Back in the 1980s stockbrokers in London had about six colour text monitors each. In the 1990s I bought a used multisync monitor that had been used for something like that as it had bad screen burn (and a price that reflected that).
p.s. watch the first few seconds of "Black Wednesday (BBC 1997)" here on RUclips to see how many monitors a currency trader needed back in the early 1990s.
Thanks for not blowing out my speakers with loud bass notes.
display on that brother monitor looks gorgeous.
I can't possibly imagine it had anything in common with the Trash Eighty... That's some lovely colors, and a nice collection of DOS utilities.
That text mode Pacman reminds me of the version I played on a 286 XT in the early '90s. Not sure if that was the same as here.
Wow, Poke-Man is a blast from the past. It came installed on a turbo XT I was given when I was in high school. I remember it ran too fast at 8MHz on that thing, too.
I got a chuckle outta Viper. The ship is quite phallic!🤣
Did you try running either card in your NCR without disabling its onboard VGA? There's a good chance it would work, providing a DTDA occupied only MDA address space (0xB0000-B7FFF frame buffer & 0x3B0-3BF I/O). CGA was B8000-BFFFF & 0x3D0-3DF. EGA & VGA were usually the same, plus extra space for their new modes, but still left the MDA ranges clear. I ran dual-headed ISA MDA + VLB SVGA for a while under Linux, with a hacked video driver to allow a text console to remain active on the mono monitor alongside a color X11 desktop. Very handy! This was before any other multi-monitor setup was supported on mainstream PCs. With VGA still enabled, your NCR's mono/color jumper would probably have determined which monitor was used to boot, after which MODE MONO / MODE CO80 could switch between them in DOS.
OMG, I'd fogotten about GW BASIC. I wrote so many games in it.
Very bizarre cards. Great video as always.
This looks like the perfect card to play ZZT, the Kroz games, and a ton of classic roguelikes, alongside the text adventures you mentioned. I wonder if any games apart from Nibbles used 80x50 pseudo graphics using the half-height block characters.
I didn't expect this video to go so fast! I guess that means it was interesting :D. ...and I forgot all about the Pac-Man clone Poke-man, I can't remember where I saw and played it, but I vaguely remember it.
@08:40 Oh come on VWestlife! It's only 2400 Miles! 🙂
That would mean i have to refill my tank about 13 times to get there and back (625km or 388mi per tank, a bit lower than the actual range).
Also it would take about 48 Hours to get there and the same Amount to get back (at 80km/h or 50mi/h average speed).
Quite a ride for a monitor....
AND: Nice Video as always! Thanks!
Still cheaper than shipping it here. haha
@@nickwallette6201 That depends on what Regular Gasoline costs in the USA at the moment and what Service Costs (Repairs, Maintenance) i would generate by driving that distance with my 34 year old car...
Quite a ride for a monitor.... especially one that doesn't work. I did have someone do a 400 mile round trip to get a monitor I was selling "collect only" but that was a working 20" Dell Trinitron.
So glad its 3 a.m. when i watch this
Interesting, can't say I'd ever heard of a 25khz monitor, it makes me wonder if they're possibly the same as the 24khz "medium res"(508x381) tubes used on arcade machines in the mid to late '90s, but just driven differently. Those used analogue RGB, as I imagine folks would suspect.
I was one of the very few that had a prototype for the Tandy 5000 ! Never made it to market!
Actually it did, just in limited numbers due to the low popularity of the Microchannel bus.
LOL at that bodge wire. I guess they used up the jumper cables from everyone's vehicle emergency kit, and the only thing they had available was spare cable from the power supply harnesses. It'll do, I suppose. hahaha!
That looks to be a shielded wire. You can see the soldered ground braid. Maybe it was carrying an analog signal?
@@DaveMcAnulty Either that or a critical clock signal. Even at 21MHz you need to be careful with track layout, termination etc.
04:36 You could imagine someone who does accounting would like it to colour-code different categories.
My NCR PC4i has a Mitsubishi 25kHz color monitor in it. Its sharpness and resolution is sooo much better than an IBM CGA monitor.
Interesting that Mitsu monitor you have supports the NGA graphics mode! It would be nice to pair with a PC6... if any still exist...
12:14 Could this be where the idea of making links blue and underlined came from?
I don't really think so. Blue just happens to be a nice contrasting color against a white background without being too garish, and also making them underlined (which most web browsers don't do anymore) makes the links visible on a monochrome monitor.
Hyperlinks are commonly blue and were invented along with html in the 90s, this being 80s it's probably just a happy coincidence?
IIRC the flashing is actually set by sending a special character to the screen, and turned off with another or the same character.
I believe you could make just a section of text flash and the card does that without needing to tell it to redraw everything.
PS
It's a bit more complicated than just sending a character.
*Here it is according to CHATGPT:*
"In text mode, each character on the screen is represented by a byte for the character itself and another byte for the attribute, which controls the text's color, background, and other effects like blinking.
The attribute byte is structured as follows (for 16-color text modes):
Bits 0-3: Foreground color
Bits 4-6: Background color
Bit 7: Blinking/Intensity bit
If Bit 7 is set to 1, the text will blink."
the Commodore AGA card in the PC10-II line had quirk in the other direction. CGA (320x200) with additional 16 colors instead of 4 and 640x200 with 4 or 16 colors instead of 2, it was somewhat compatible with Plantronics cards.
But it had not better Text color modes (but at least MDA with a 132 column mode)... and yes, all with the same monitor, which was not multisync.
It's good so many companies thought about needing to override the monochrome setting. Probably various examples of quirky graphics cards. Wonder if there's a way to temporarily trick a program in to reading that it's color and then setting it back to prevent breakage and get some more software working in color. What about something like epic games' ZZT?
It would have been neat to see what happened if you tried to run a 40-column game, such as the (in)famous Castle Adventure. Despite its bugginess, it's my personal go-to for testing 40-column modes. There were plenty of other 40-column games from the 80s, though!
Love your Oddware stuff dude.
I was a huge fan of text-mode color "graphics" back in the day. If you're stuck with only CGA for a long time, the best games are the ones that run in CGA (hi-res) monochrome, or 16-color text. that 4-color garbage was almost never worth it
Y E S - retro computer video video!
Certainly is quite the mashup of standards, which I suppose at the time were barely considered to be "standard", but I suppose of all you needed was to see what you were doing, then it did the job, kind of like the old NHS glasses we used to have back in the day, cheap & ugly, but worked... :P
I am waiting for youtube videos played on this card!
11:56 maybe that's why the web uses hyperlinks in blue and highlighted? just a thought.
This doesn’t seem to be the reason - seems like blue hyperlinks started in 93. There’s a great article if you search “why are hyperlinks blue.” I wouldn’t have read it without your suggestion here! Thank you.
There's an article on Mozilla's blog, "Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue", that tells the story of blue hyperlinks. The basic takeaway is that shades of blue make for a visible accept but are unobtrusive, both on dark and light backgrounds - compared to, say, red, which is too flashy. So it had more to do with psychology than with technology.
Also, the modern web started on NeXT computers, which were monochrome at the time (so first hyperlinks were _just_ underlined), and then developed on various UNIX workstations. Mainstream platforms like Windows and Mac came a bit later - moreover, the early instances of hyperlink-like concepts in the PC world were actually green - that's how links were shown in Windows 3.x help files; DOS 6 help hyperlinks were monochrome but marked with green semigraphics.
So... your theory is interesting, but I find it unlikely.
One application for color text might be terminal emulation, particularly IBM 3270 and 5250. IBM had introduced color by that time.
I wonder how much Tandy Paid Gates for that shout out?
Probably a nice discount on copies of MS-DOS. .
that lcd monitor could likely be made to display all colours google 'cga to scart' adaptor, theres some diy circuits, they could likely be adapted for it as they convert rgb plus intensity digital to rgb analogue ..??
NEC is like IBM or VGA and should be pronounced that way. 😀
Then why would they introduce a computer called the NEC Trek, if they didn't intend for you to pronounce it "neck"?
Viper is actually pretty impressive for text mode.
THE FUTURE!
excellent kevin..🎉🎉🎉❤
One minute ago is crazy.
FAST !!!
@15:53 - Is that the first flash application ever written?
@00:23 When you look at the comparison chart between the Tandy and the IBM, you see that Big Blue offers a computer that will work... barely, with stripped down peripherals. The demos you would see, just like when you buy a newly built house, are with all the periherals and trinkets thrown in: max RAM, top tier everything, etc.... Nothing has changed in over 40 years: if you want to buy a Macintosh laptop or desktop, the lowest price posted will give you a working computer, but with bare bones capability, and if you want it to run "fast", then you have to buy the extra ram, storeage, more CPUs, etc... IBM and Apple have excelled in ripping off their customers by overcharging them and then making them buy the whole equipment all over again in a few years when they become "obsolete" and neither support nor parts are available anywhere.
That's only _somewhat_ true of modern day Apple. 1980s IBM was selling computers without a video adapter, without an operating system, without any IO, and with just one floppy drive in an outdated standard. If you buy the cheapest MacBook today... yes, it has 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, which are rather laughable in this day and age, but it is actually usable. It has an OS, it can connect to the Internet out of the box, and despite the specs are very modest, it will do just about everything you'd expect a computer to do.
Yes, Apple's upgrade pricing is abysmal. But it is a difference between not having a usable computer at the base price, and actually having one.
You said to display underline on MDA, you tell it display blue. Is there a similar method for blink or reverse text, is there a color you tell it it to display for each of those? Also, some early MDA cards were wired for color. Do those also show the underline text as blue when attached to an appropriate monitor?
Only underlined text is set by choosing a color on MDA. Blinking is a separate attribute that works on either color or monochrome, just like inverse video.
@@jafirelkurd AFAIR blinking is the same attribute as background color intensity, i.e. if you set the background to e.g light green, it will actually be dark green, but the foreground will blink.
I'm pretty sure there's a way to force light background colors instead, at least on VGA and beyond, but that's how it works by default.
My only guess that color text only card was for productivity/office users
My grandad bought a Tandy 2000 back in the day but unfortunately the computer got burned up in fire about 10 years ago.
Yay, new vwestlife video.
I can't help but wonder if this is actually an MDA clone. Very early MDA cards actually had undocumented support for color, and I wonder if this works in the same way.
Fun fact, even modern graphics cards have an explicit text-only mode.
Would’ve been the perfect addition for a terminal.
I've never felt so dumb listening to everything you said in this video. So above my head lol.
I imagine Shares/ Forex traders needed colour text .
Is that some king of terminal serial deployment?
I believe this is the first time I've ever heard anyone pronounce NEC as ""neck"
Then you've never heard of the NEC Trek computer.
22:42 🥰🌞👍🏻
As much as I love these videos, this is TOO much in the weeds, even for me, a fan
It is a deep dive, but as the first and only video about these cards, I felt it necessary to cover them in detail.
These worked in the 1200
If the plug fits
you still might quits
Tandy was so non-standard machine, that many games have a tandy mode 😂
"non-standard" mean IBM compactivity, there was no "standard" at all. Botth IBM and TANDY was save lot of money it there was sit in same table, and make one.
Actually the reason so many games had a "Tandy mode" is because the IBM PCJr was far too unsuccessful for the game publishers to call it "PCJr mode".
@@hobbified Maybe you can make episode for that, and thell a story =)
Well these are weird as hell
Wasn't sure if this would be interesting, but it was!
"Vivid, 8-color Graphics" LOL
8 colors out of a palette of 16, at 640x400 resolution... which was better than IBM's 4 colors at 320x200 or only 2 colors at 640x200.
I have a game that runs too fast for pentium 4 computer called Moto Racing. This game moto racing needs a slower computer windows 95 maybe slower cpu
That was Deskmate, not Windows on Gates' Tandy 2000.
No, it was an early beta version of Windows 1.0.
@@vwestlifeYep ... upon closer inspection ...
Yikes!
5th comment :D
dude color is useful even if there aren't graphics. dumb terminals used color and zero graphics A LOT, so I don't know why you say "if you don't need graphics, you probably don't need color" because that is just not even remotely based on reality - at least not the reality that most of us inhabit.
First.. rude. Second, untrue.
Mono displays were used right up until (and for some, throughout) the 90s, when color was absolutely available and not wildly expensive. It just wasn't that critical for lots of ordinary tasks.
Think about it:
* Word processing. You really need 80x25, but not graphics, and not color. You're either going to send as TXT or print in mono anyway.
* Spreadsheets. Same. If you really need charts and graphs, then Hercules is plenty. Again, if you're printing, then you're probably doing it in mono. If you're really REALLY fancy, _maybe_ you send a job to the local print house to make slides in color. Then, it would be _nice_ to have CGA modes, but not strictly necessary, and that would only net you 4 colors anyway.
* Presentations. You need graphics, but not necessarily color. If you're printing, mono is plenty fine. If you're making slides, it's the same deal as above -- color would be nice, but at this point, your options are still limited anyway.
* Desktop Publishing. Graphics, in mono. See: Macintosh, which was the reigning king of this market for years, for exactly this reason. Affordable graphics, for a workflow that was going to yield mono prints anyway, most of the time. (Color DTP was very expensive, and very slow, but if you really needed it, there were boutique products to upgrade a Mac with the necessary hardware.)
* Coding. Just need text. 80x25, preferably. Nobody's doing colored syntax highlighting at this point.
* CAD. Must have graphics. More speed, more pixels, but color is a luxury that few need.
* Terminals (as you said). The majority of this was text-only, mono-only. Yeah, there's color now. However, as much as I live in CLI land, about the only thing I do that has color text in a terminal window is colorized 'ls'. Maybe the odd code fix in nano/vim with syntax highlighting. But again -- that's a very 2005+ thing to have. Nobody was thinking about this in the 80s.
* Games. Text adventures just need mono text. Graphical games will be designed for Hercules or CGA.
In none of those scenarios are you at a point where need text, but not graphics, but you do need color. The only scenario I can envision where it makes sense is if you have the budget to upgrade either the monitor OR the card, but not both at the same time, and you want to have an upgrade path in the future that takes advantage of your investment. In that case, color monitor today, text card now, graphics card later.
That neck monitor is so thin.
Hoooly cr@p! $4,250 1984 bucks is worth $12,876.64 in 2024. That was an expensive @$$ Radio Shack puter'
At work in 1981 we had a full blown Tandy TRS80 system with all the accessories like disc drives. They employed a guy as "the computer operator" to use it.