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.
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here's an opinion i've had about retrocomputing / nerd culture for a long long time
the overwhelming majority of "cool" computers that everyone "wishes they had" were created to perform dreadfully boring tasks, by people who wished they were anywhere else, in the service of people who did a ton of coke and left our economy a smoking husk that can't support life
you do not want a cray-1. all they are is calc.exe but very fast and you can't even touch the buttons, you have to write a program that touches them. the purpose of a 'supercomputer' is to sit humming for 24 days and then produce a single integer, or 25 million integers
unboxing a protogen. lifting them out of the styrofoam blocks. peeling the plastic film off their faceplate
throwing away the 6" USB cord that came in the box and digging a nice 10' anker with a velcro strap out of a drawer, plugging it into their ear. CHARGE COMPLETE IN: 116 HOURS. you dejectedly sit on the edge of the bed and look at your phone
series of snapchat screenshots
"unboxing my protogen"
"man they used those packing peanuts ugh haha"
"nice long cord"
"here's his d*ck"
imagine if microsoft offered professional services to anyone who could pay. i would pay $300, one time, to have someone at MS who actually knows something log into my PC and figure out why explorer can't render thumbnails
no sfc /scannow bullshit, i mean they raymond chen that shit, they get in and coredump explorer and go "okay you have a png library that paint.net installed, that's the problem"
honestly, i'd pay any company for that if they were trustworthy, but "repair windows pc" is basically a stopword. there are hundreds of millions of people who think they have complicated and interesting problems, but don't, and millions of amoral vultures preying on them
i'm watching the first episode of house m.d. out of curiosity but almost the entire episode is in monochrome other than flesh tones and i swear to god the house m.d. i watched on hulu in 2007 didn't look like this. i love the revisionist history of rereleases
this is absolutely not how it looked when i watched it 15 years ago. what the fuck is this war crime color grading it looks like i died in a 1950s hospital and my ghost still haunts that place @Emoji_Nakamoto
the last movies i watched were 300 and sin city and they had more life and saturation in them than this. this is *not* what i watched in 2008.
occasionally i try to play a diablolike - i apparently bought grim dawn ages ago? i have no memory of this. but like. do you like this game? i have a question: when you look at this, do you... see something? not just a blur?
i don't understand how a human brain can contain this many numbers simultaneously unless you're a math savant. this is what every single diablo game (including current-patch diablo ii) looks like now and I just don't get it.
i don't understand what's fun about having 9 things side by side that have literally 20+ attributes i need to compare, all of which differ by a percent or two, and no shorthand whatsoever for deciding which i should use