digger
Experienced Member
Would it be possible to design a 16-bit VGA card for AT&T 6300 / Olivetti M24 PCs?
(I'm not sure if someone has floated the following idea here before. A quick Google search on this forum didn't seem to turn up anything. But feel free to point me to such a topic if one already exists.)
So there have been some (quite impressive) hobby projects on the Internet (many of them on this forum) to create various new add-on cards for vintage computers, using new old stock VGA chips, such as the Trident-based ISA Super VGA card.
It has lead me to wonder: would it be possible to design (and possibly manufacture) a 16-bit VGA card for the proprietary 16-bit expansion bus of the AT&T 6300 / Olivetti M24 PC?
I know that many 16-bit cards would never work in such a system, since they often require access to resources only available on 286+ systems, such as higher IRQ lines, higher DMA channels and/or memory mapping above 1MB. But with VGA cards, at least ISA-based ones, that's not the case, right?
The advantage of such a hypothetical card for these eccentric machines would be two-fold:
I know, it's easy for me to think of some crazy idea and have someone else do the hard work of actually trying to implement something like this, but I just don't have the expertise to design something like that. I wish I did.
Anyway, feel free to punch some holes in this crazy idea. :lol:
(I'm not sure if someone has floated the following idea here before. A quick Google search on this forum didn't seem to turn up anything. But feel free to point me to such a topic if one already exists.)
So there have been some (quite impressive) hobby projects on the Internet (many of them on this forum) to create various new add-on cards for vintage computers, using new old stock VGA chips, such as the Trident-based ISA Super VGA card.
It has lead me to wonder: would it be possible to design (and possibly manufacture) a 16-bit VGA card for the proprietary 16-bit expansion bus of the AT&T 6300 / Olivetti M24 PC?
I know that many 16-bit cards would never work in such a system, since they often require access to resources only available on 286+ systems, such as higher IRQ lines, higher DMA channels and/or memory mapping above 1MB. But with VGA cards, at least ISA-based ones, that's not the case, right?
The advantage of such a hypothetical card for these eccentric machines would be two-fold:
- It would take maximum advantage of the available bus bandwidth and thus provide the best possible graphics performance on such systems
- It wouldn't require the use of an aftermarket bus correction kit to swap the byte order when performing I/O on such cards, as is the case when using 8-bit EGA and VGA cards in those same machines
I know, it's easy for me to think of some crazy idea and have someone else do the hard work of actually trying to implement something like this, but I just don't have the expertise to design something like that. I wish I did.
Anyway, feel free to punch some holes in this crazy idea. :lol: