unknown EGA card?

[phonophan]

Greetings all -

I have this EGA ISA card and can't really find any info about it... it works and I'm assuming it's a standard ole EGA card?

What would the toggle/switch on the rear bracket do?







Thanks, in advance, for your time and help!

 

[SomeGuy]

That looks fairly close to a Video 7 VEGA EGA card:
https://arvutimuuseum.ee/th99/v/U-Z/52394.htm

Basically, if I read that right, the toggle switch enables some kind of full CGA or mono emulation.

 

[davide78]

The manual of the Video 7 VEGA is here: http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/man...hics Adapter (VEGA) - Users Manual - 1985.pdf
From the picture on page 52, your card looks like a "short card" VEGA. The toggle and dip switches select the monitor type and the presence of another video card in the system, if any.

 

[phonophan]

Great, thanks so much all!

 

[kdr]

What a cool card! The surface-mounted PLCC chips give the card a real "retro future" vibe. There are a lot of little programmable logic devices on the card as well, presumably because the 82C43x EGA chipset is a 100% clone of the IBM EGA chipset and thus lacks any kind of hardware CGA/Hercules emulation support.

Note that your card appears to be a "Video 7 EGA+" from 1987 (based on the BIOS label) and has a sixth switch that isn't present on the older VEGA cards. Presumably this switch enables some kind of "Super EGA" support, perhaps for a 400-line or other high resolution monitor? [Even though there is only a 16.257Mhz oscillator on board, hmm...] But SW1-5 ought to work as described.

If you ever have time to dump the video BIOS, there's a thread on VOGONS where we are collecting them:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=76185&p=887911