Hacker News Reader

I still have my green & white steel-balled mouse somewhere :) CGA/EGA gfx mode was pretty bad though, so still used EGA text mode in WW until final editing. (But it beat Electric Pencil in all upper case lol.)

I really miss the slow-burn green screen w/the Hercules text card though -- esp. as a 2nd screen for debugging.

View on HN

I've heard tell of the dual-screen DOS machine with a Hercules. How did this actually work? Did special debuggers support it, or something?

The reason why this works is that IBM CGA/EGA/VGA map their text-mode video-RAM at segment 0xB800..0xBFFF, and in graphics-mode at 0xA000..0xAFFF. MDA and Hercules, on the other hand, map the video memory at 0xB000..0xB7FF, for reasons I never fully understood.

So, if you plug a Hercules card and a VGA card, you can have two screens. Some debuggers supported it. I never got it to work back in the day with my ET4000 and an MDA scavenged from a PC-XT, but I was just a teenager with no access to StackOverflow.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com