Hacker News Reader

Comment by RickSanchez2600 | Hacker News Reader

If it supported ISA for the old DOS PCs that didn't have PCI bus it would be a good upgrade for the old school PCs out there. Monochrome MGA used a different address than VGA/CGA/EGA uses. So you could have two monitors in old school PCs.

View on HN

Regarding the PC monochrome display adapter memory offset vs. CGA/etc. offsets, I wrote some direct memory write display code in Turbo Pascal to take advantage of that, which let me use two monitors in toy ways. But the only real use I recall hearing of the second display was for a debugger (at Microsoft).

i was never a turbo pascal user, but my first real programming environment was borland's turbo c, a close relative. it had a great debugger that would allow you to run your app on your primary color monitor, and display the contents of the turbo debugger on your monochrome display. turbo debugger was also great for single-stepping your way through other people's programs in the same way.

back in the day, i wrote a VGA-based game that, if it detected a secondary monochrome display, would put up a whole bunch of real-time-updating graphics statistics on it. that made performance tuning a lot easier.

I loved Turbo C, too. When TC came out, it put a good C compiler in the hands of some young programmers for whom the main Microsoft compiler was prohibitively expensive. Same with Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger.

Not very practical, but I remember a friend doing a demoscene intro or demo, around year 98, using both a VGA and an Hercules card in the same computer.

The Hercules screen showed some animation in the order of "Don't look here, the demo is in the other screen"

I'll have to check pouet.net to find it...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com