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.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
you won't find anything really interesting coming from nearly any media business because their revenue sources aren't "put out interesting writing which people can only get here, so they have to subscribe." now it's... god, I don't even know.
the way things sucked before was so interesting, and now it all sucks in the same way.
it's always the same thing. every day, the same thing. everything is bad for the same reasons. I used to complain about businesses. I gave up. There's no point. It's always the same explanation, and everyone already knows what it is.
thinking about how we've fallen so far from gods light. in 1994, a pc magazine writer tasked with covering doom bit their lip, thought a little, and said "i should put a complete map editing tutorial in there. maybe next to the cheat codes"
let me tell you why the future we live in sucks so much dog shit every single second of every single day: data. as recently as the 2000s, businesses were stumbling through life completely lost and had no idea what they were doing. now they know, and everything sucks
do you fucking know how many people got paid anywhere from a living wage to big bucks to sit around and "i don't know, do something", and then nobody knew how to figure out if the thing they did made any money, or in fact, if they did it at all?
I haven't even hit 100k subscribers and this is what my inbox looks like. every day i get emails
I now receive multiple shill offers daily. Most are "from" electronics "manufacturer" storefronts on amazon that likely do not exist as anything more than a sheet of paper in a government office in China and one of hundreds of rollstamps at a factory in Shenzhen.
I can't figure out the scam, honestly. I'm positive these "businesses" don't exist in any meaningful way - all the six-letter names you see on Amazon and Aliexpress cannot have staff and offices. There have to be millions of them, it's unthinkable.
so it turns out that the rubberized coating on the Latitude E6420 is not the only thing that high-test isopropyl dissolves. it strips the paint right off the plastic.
well, nothing to do but to do it
the upper 2" of paint are absolutely nuclear-grade. must be baked on there from years of heat, took as long to remove 1/3 of that part as it took to strip the whole rest of the thing