Thread by @gravislizard

Last night I discovered the Wyse WY-700 graphics card existed by seeing it in PCem, and today a friend sends me a picture of one and says "this thing is CGA-compatible but does 1280x800" and now i'm actively shitting myself

that's the bad boy right there, it's a dual-board 8-bit ISA card which is totally fucked. I want one, but apparently they're either collectible or needed for CNC machines because they're $80-120 used.

So I fired it up in PCem and jesus CHRIST that's a HELL of a FONT. it doesn't look like much but this is a 1:1 image, not stretched for better web presentation

16x16 font, looking at it up close makes me feel incredibly weird. it's just so smooth. the letters have these great big plateaus of solid color.

it's CGA compatible, but monochrome (maps all colors to four shades of grey,) which probably explains how they pulled it off while still using the original MC6845 CRTC - that thing was flexible on an otherworldly level but still had very specific limitations.

It's buck wild that I can just run KARNOV.EXE in pixel-quadrupled mode on period hardware

There is also a 1280x800 pixel addressable mode as I understand it, and as one would expect, but I haven't learned how to access that yet and I suspect it'll be a bit too much brain-work to set it up at the moment.

It turns out there's a native driver for Windows 3. Here's Win 3 installing in plain (quadrupled) CGA greyscale

obviously this looks about like CGA would have looked

...and here it is in native 1280x800. i could absolutely evaporate

the purpose of this thing, as usual in the 80s, was to display two 8.5x11 pages at once on a single display. This was the absolute holy grail of 80s graphics, everyone was obsessed with fullscreen WYSIWYG editing.

It was also a cold grand in 1986, with the proprietary (interlaced!!!) monitor, which was either very good or very bad value depending on where you stand.