7" Amber Flat Screen on VGA Feature Connector / Playing Doom / TFEL Display 

These displays were the darlings of military contracts in the 1980s because of their extreme operating temperature gamut, and extremely fast switching speeds compared to LCD or even neon gas plasma, they can even be constructed on a transparent substrate for heads-up displays (and were used exactly for that purpose), a great display if you can get your hands on one, but second hand prices now are somewhat insane. The interface is a very simple 8 bit parallel interface.

I have definitely used cash machines with that screen back in the 1990's! Which typically ran OS/2 Warp in the background for stability and security. Each pixel is either on or off, so any application (or game!) that requires gradients of hue or saturation is going to look pretty rough, as you demonstrated. but it was not designed for that, just super-clear interfaces like a cash machine needed. Very interesting to see the raw digital output from that Trident card, of course normally with the single 15-pin connector it is analogue. The Feature connector is performing like a modern Display Port connector. I remember so many cards had that Feature connector, but never saw anything that used it, so this video was very interesting for that reason. PS, I am pretty sure, although it's a very old memory of mine, that Norton Sysinfo has a command line option to start it in mono mode, where it would actually look fine on your display. Anyway - thank you for the great video! You should try to watch one of your videos on this :)

I saw this on early 90's CNC machines running to this day. The interface is mostly lines and numbers so this display handles it perfectly fine

Instead of CGA, you should probably go with Hercules or other monochrome modes. Of course newer DOS games didn't have support for those, but some older ones, could work. It could also work under Windows 3.x - it had a monochrome modes which would make it look more like old Macs (which were also just 2 colors, no greyscale).

I had an old amber VGA CRT back in the 90's and from memory I needed to include a "DEVICE=DISPLAY.SYS MONO" line (or something similar) in CONFIG.SYS to get colour text to display as "Black & Amber". Also, these older motherboards usually also have a jumper for MONO/COLOR although I've never seen it make any difference with a colour display attached.

In my company we are still using that display for one of the devices we sell, since 95. Its a very high quality, high contrast, very wide angle display

I'd say the display works as expected. AFAIK, the data on the VESA Feature Connector is just the raw 8-bit data that goes to the RAMDAC. That means it gets the palette index of the color that's to be shown. One problem is that the palette itself is *not* transmitted; without an additional ISA or PCI connection (to snoop VGA palette writes), a device on the FC can't know what any entry in the palette is supposed to look like. So what does the display do? It can't win, so it doesn't even try. It seems that it's just examining one bit of the palette index; from what I saw in the video, it's most probably bit 0 (LSB). In CGA/EGA-derived text modes, which use a fixed palette, this creates a relatively useful mapping: everything that has at least 50% blue to it will light up the pixel. The problem is, many DOS programs use a white-on-blue color scheme by default (Norton Commander, Norton SysInfo, Turbo Pascal etc.). The blue background will be rendered as lit, just as the white foreground. VGA graphics mode, however, it where it really becomes nasty: Almost every game redefines the VGA palette, so there's no fixed correspondence between the color that should be visible and the state of the TFEL. What you get is noise. Things to try: - Run DOS textmode apps in monochrome mode, if they have one. That should eliminate the white-on-white issue. - See if the significant palette bit can be changed somehow; maybe there's a jumper for that? Or re-wite the Feature Connector cable to route other bits to bit 0. The result should be that other palette entries are used to determine the TFEL state; games tend to have broader distinctions between colors in the upper bits, and more useful patterns may thus emerge. (For example, with Doom, bit 4 should select between amber and black based on the hue of the color that would be displayed on a color monitor.)

These are developed and assembled in Finland. Lohja Elektroniikka sold this business to Planar System in 1990 and Planar sold the business back to other Finnish company Beneq in 2012. These are used in medical devices, industrial solutions, airplanes etc.

Would it work with Hercules monochrome graphics card? Would it not be a perfect match for this display? Prince, Prehistorik, North & South all support Hercules Graphics.

Windows 3.1 will work using the VGA drivers, but using the "Monochrome+dithering" themes from CGA or Hercules.

USE HERCULES MODE(720x348)!!! I played for YEARS using amber on HERCULES mode on my 8086 with CGA/HERC card

Never heard about this technology and how it worked, despite having seen some indeed on vintage industrial equipment (computer controlled lathes). I always thought these were plasma things like the DMD displays on pinball machines. It's also the display GLaDOS uses as a backup terminal and karaoke display ;)

This takes me way back to the first PC my dad bought, an IBM 8088 clone with an amber screen made by Mitsuba. Played many, many hours of chuck yeager's flight sim and learned to program BASIC on it.

The Apollo DSKY display was also Electroluminescent, 250V at 800Hz so this is an old technology 😀

It's a shame that it's (probably) expensive and it doesn't do any sort of grayscale. It'd make an awesome replacement for an Amstrad PPC's LCD screen.

I've got a small luggable PC (like a clone Compaq Portable III) which has a gas plasma display in it. Connects to the VGA feature connector like your display. It displays monochrome shades of amber perfectly in 16 colour modes, but in 256 colour modes it acts like the colour palette settings aren't working, and you get very weird effects. Still, despite all this, it's a fun display to try out, and certainly has similarities to your display!

IIRC, weren't Hercules graphics straight black and white? That might be playable here. Really cool display though. Good catch by your friend. 👍

These displays were "unobtainium" in the LCD scene 20 years ago. Programs like LCDstudio were all the rage in the modding world and those EL panels were the absolute darlings.

Looks similar to plasma from T2100 Toshiba "notebook". Only colour is slightly different.

Are there any cards with Hercules emulation that can hook in to it? Also fastdoom might support a vga monochrome high res dithered mode.

It's very cool, but you really should just run B&W Software , on that monitor 😉😀

If I ever win the lottery, I'll be sure to pick one of these up. They're so interesting, just unfortunately so expensive : P

I wonder how this would look with the Hercules Graphics Card's B&W mode.

Old Mac OSs are in MONO, try hooking it up to an old mac in BW mode, Should work fine if you can adapt the video connector. Keep making great videos

EL displays were featured on GridCase rugged laptops used by the military and the NASA in the 80s to the 90s. These were made famous by the automated machine guns scene in the uncut version of Aliens!

9:42 You might want to try Hercules 2 color mode in stead of CGA 4 color.

Me personally I would use that as a sensor monitor pacifically for monitoring my temperature CPU fan speed and such

Thank you. Very interesting video. It's cool to discover something new! Keep informing us about those technologies that did not become mainstream!

This display is so difficult to find, I am surprised that you have it. Where did you get this? (Curious as I like some classic display technology, especially the mash between new and old, especially VFD and Neon displays.)

Gotta love amber displays! In text mode this thing looks way cool, definitely neat display tech!

i sugest using high framerate camera to see how the pixels are refreshing this screen would work much better with hercules mono and prince of persia have hercules mode

I'de love one of these. Did you check contrast with darkened plastic? Or may be some other sort of filter.

I'm ecstatic that it's bad for retro games, these displays are already expensive enough without PC collectors wanting them

I have a feeling this would have been fitted to the 1970=80 Nasa space craft, if they were still going to the Moon, next gen DSKY

This would've been so nice to have back in 83 lol

Doom: The Matrix has you, Neo! :-D

If you made a little bracket to mount the display to the card it would be a great POST diag screen. I personally would love to build a little folding textmode terminal with it. I wonder if it has a grayscale mode, or if it has the ability to do bright/dim pixels.This would be fun to get working with a 1bit mac too

Dithering can be used to simulate more shades. Not sure if it can be done on the fly fast enough to play games, but displaying dithered 1bit pictures would be possible.

Very specialist and quite interesting!

Would have been nice to see how they're generating that mono image. Is it just taking one of the 3 channels? I think this is the first time I've ever seen anything that connects to that VGA Feature connector.

I know I've dealt with many gas pumps and ATMs with full color displays that I wish used something like this instead--though e-ink would probably make sense for monocolor screens now.

Love seeing you back and making amazing videos for us again! Just want to say how much I love your work, and loved hearing you laugh at the beginning of the video, really good to hear you laughing! Take care buddy! And can’t wait to watch what you are about to share with us!

Hmmmm.... electroluminescent ... makes me think "DSKY". I had a mono VGA CRT long ago... it had the same problem.... I think it only used 1 of the 3 RGB channels... fine for text mode command line Linux though.

This looks like the displays from gas pumps. Since it's a 640x480 display, at least with 320x240 games it would be cool to write a TSR that dithers a 320x240 image with a 4x4 pixel grid to achieve a pseudo 4 shades of amber image? You should see if you can get a monochrome version of this screen technology also.

I saw an article in a Danish Hifi-magazine during the 1990-1991 timeframe, that dealt with future display technologies and in here Finlux (Nokia Consumer Electronics Department) was quoted for developing Electro-Luminiscence displays. That is, working on developing better screens and with higher resolutions than their initial prototype that was showed I remember it, because this particular article formed the vision in me of one day having a large flat screen televisions in my living room. I fantasized that much, that I even made a drawing back in the day, 1991, of a large flat screen television standing on its feet on the living room floor. Angled upwards for better in-line viewing. And I think, only one year after reading about this (1992) we began to see 10.4" Thin Film Transistor, TFT Black Matrix displays in the most expensive portable computers at the time, Toshiba T3200 SXC and IBM Thinkpad 700C. TFT Black Matrix is a rock solid hardcore name. The beige portable IBM suitcase though, from the same timespan, came with a little flat screen plasma display instead, but that was also amber. So with these technologies penetrating the market at that time, it was within reason to presume that sooner or later we would see this technology entering our homes. And boy...did it ever. It sure turned out to be a tsunami quite frankly. To end the story. We bought a 50" Panasonic Plasma G10 television in 2009 and it's still showing a spectacular picture more than 13 years after the purchase and I get awestucked almost every time I watch a Bluray through this display. It's capable of turning itself into an invisible piece of transparent glass, when watching good source material. Well. Cheerioh, ol' chump. Have yourself an excellent January. My best to the Misses.

my dos setup [that hasn't been fully set up] has a Intel Core I9 12900HK 32GB of ddr4 ram and a NVIDIA RTX 3080 Laptop [in other words I just use dosbox]

Sokoban on an amber display, that's how I played a game for the first time ever! Amber displays have a special place in my heart =]. Amazing video as always, it's incredible the kind of equipment you manage to find out there!

Gosh, if I can find which one it was I'll post the name. There's an episode of Computer Chronicles from the early 1980s that covered CES. One of the items on display was a "two page" _plasma_ amber flat screen. It was absolutely gorgeous. And huge. Would be awesome to play with one of those.

If you could make it compatible with the composite signal, I bet a Sinclair ZX81 would look great on that!!

In the nineties I had an XT PC with amber monochrome crt, so I liked the color of this screen a lot, I think much easier on the eyes then green on black as I see usually. It remembers me of the amber low pressure sodium lamps that lit our highways. Sadly we threw away that old XT as back then we thought of it as old garbage. I regret that...

hmmm I wonder if this can be used with that single board 486 you have? Can it be powered by batteries? If so, can you build a retro SBC? 11:27 ok what about a dual screen SBC? Like a retro nintendo ds, just WAY bigger? Using this screen for text applications, and another for gaming?

We need Bad Apple on this!

With those specs sounds quite expensive. That response and brightness and operating range, I see many comments about industrial and military applications. Cool find!

It does text, but only on a black background - lol -. Applied Science did an electroluminescent display - ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Z2o_Sp2-aBo.html

Added to my wanted list 😁

I would build an emulated early-hackintosh machine with that display, as those early B/W Macintosh are also 1 bit color. Prince of Persia for the classic Macintosh and many other games and applications were developed with those constraints in mind, so it is much nicer: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6WUJw3il1VU.html There is an emulator named "vmac" that have a DOS version, but the site seems abandoned. The newer "mini vmac" don't have a DOS version :( What would work is Tiny Core Linux (works on a 486) with mini vmac.

I almost managed to get a hold of a Planar TTL electroluminescent display at a local computer store about twenty years ago. It could be used with any standard monochrome graphics card. It was mounted to an old medical computer cart and it actually folded up like a laptop computer. Someone ended up beating me to it before I went back to buy it. I have yet to see another, either online or in person.

I am into wide tires cars for all the reasons other than driving them. If I made one video about it I'd get hellabanned from RU-vid. Edit: These were a short lived thing in the early 2000's for cash register PCs, but they were insanely expensive, there were also desktop full color monitors in this technology (I think they were called FED, field emitting display), I remember reading a recension of one and it was mostly bad - worse than a CRT and near to 2000's LCD quality so it had no chance to survive.

Going from my old DOS days. you need to configure the video card to output in grey scale to the display. I agree with the other's comments that this was for either point of sale or ATM system.

Nice, pity EL displays have a poor lifespan. Yes they'll glow for years, but at quite a reduced brightness. I've seen so many EL backlights that are down to the brightness of a birthday candle.

Could work well in the Amstrad PPC640 in place of the awful LCD

I could draw better than that with Lipstick 😀 My friends Lipstick, not mine 🤣

I would love to see it work on an early Macintosh. They also had 1 bit color, including games.

I don't know if this graphics card supports it but you could try setting the games hercules graphics and see how that looks. Since hercules only uses black and white.

Should have tried games in MDA or Hercules mode - Sim City should work fine

looks like it would be a really nice terminal display for minicomputers such as the PDP-11

Ahh, I see you have SimCity on that card. SimCity fully support high-res Hercules graphics. It would have been nice to see how that display handled it.

I would love to have one of these for writing, running a simple DOS editor or word processor on. Maybe even build a custom "luggable" around one. But they are quite costly, unfortunately.

This screen is from a UA 571-C Remote Sentry Weapon System visual display unit! 😉

Beneq is the company who makes those displays and machines that can make those displays, ALD (atomic layer deposition) machines and Lumineq is trademark for displays. I think they try to make color version of it maybe they already have but at least I remember once read article about future of this technology.

This video leads me to a transcendental question, is there a version of Doom for Hercules video modes? I remember games like Outrun or Golden ax with their amber hatched graphics...

MIght try running the mode mono command from DOS and see if it helps with text graphics. Also try setting to mono in the award bios to see if it helps any.

Given that this can only display mono on/off… made me think of MDA screens. Have you tried a game in Hercules graphics mode?

I wonder if this display could be integrated into a Macintosh Portable. The worst thing about the Portable was its lack of a backlight for the mono LCD panel.

I had a display with a blue white EL backlight, but it was totally flat, EL itself was well past its best, and the display itself was a 320x200 MDA panel with plain TN display, and as slow as molasses, plus a viewing angle of around 10 degrees, only viewable in near darkness. Another was a Panasonic, similar to that TEFL display, and also it was well burnt, and also very much mono only, with barely any contrast range.

Just did a quick search on eBay and sure enough there is some for sell even new old stock however they run several hundred bucks a pop and not cheap.

Play Bad Apple!

This looks so cool, but it's soooo expensive, at least on eBay, I couldn't find any for less than 450-500 moneys.

Weird how this doesn't support shades of gray. With these very fast reaction times I'm sure they could have PWMed the pixels...

EL screens have been around a while. I have an industrial touchscreen 386sx machine that unfortunately does not work right now that has one. I believe it had 4 amber scales available? I forget the name of the vendor.

This display reminds me of a GRiD displays, probably because of the color.

I think this would be great for 70s/early 80s arcade games

Amber phosphrous plasma display. commonly used in industrial settings.

I'd love one for reading e-books and interface digital audio in a home made tablet. That's all I want my tablet to do. Maybe power it with a pi4 iI have lying around with some sort of instant boot linux os. So cool, I love it.

These displays are truly made for text only. However there are both text adventures you could run on it & you’ve forgotten text mode games. Rogue anyone? Fun video thanks, Peter. @CPU Galaxy

This could be a cool display for a retro style terminal emulator... *looks up prices* Ah... no.

I have a plasma display from a toshiba 3200 laptop. I am wondering if i can drive this with the feature connector

Looks similar to what the Grid 110x "Laptop" portables used, where they the first users?

that screen looks great but i think there was commands in config and autoexec that you could tell dos that your using a mono display but its been so long if i find the commands i will let you know so you can have fun with your screen. it does remind me of a VFD especially with the high voltage but i do not think any of the VFD had normal pixels as i think all of the VFD's where fixed characters ect.

woah that's me

Prince of Persia would've looked lovely in Hercules mode, I think.

Very cool! Beautiful display and literally the first time I've ever seen those old graphics cards pins used.

I used Hercules MDA on a amber screen a lot, but it had a higher resolution and also bright mode (however still not a game platform)

If only there was a vga driver that'd convert picture into dithered duo-tone that'd be actually playable, similar to aalib output.

Would it have displayed better if you changed the display type in the BIOS?

Ich find das Display irgendwie klasse :) Word 5.0 wäre Super. Wenn ich mich aber richtig erinnere, können die Norton Programme auch Mono darstellen.

so near yet so far lol. Although I still would have been impressed by the form factor and the clarity back in the day.

It has a CRT look to it. I would love to see the better version of this tech.

Never heard of such kind of displays before. Though some DOS tools and softwares can display mono. But Doom hahahah. Looks similar to the version they had let run in a task manager on like 800 threads or so - which also displays like a mono matrix but with shades at least haha.

THis display is for text & simple grafics only , like in information displays (like in a train) & for simple tactical/control data