A Rare Paradise Pre-EGA Graphics Card that Plays Doom 

7:26: Fitting in a _short_ slot was a desirable feature back in the day. Remember, all-discrete-logic cards were the rule initially - which made the original CGA card so large, not only was it a full-length card, but it also required a "firebreak" tall components gap on the mainboard, and it needed fitting in a dedicated 8-bit ISA slot because of the way it extended back down after/behind its ISA connector's edge. Every square inch used, not a single cm² wasted. And since not all clones had multiple full-length slots available, fitting in a mere short slot was indeed a good feature.

The "Chaos Manor" column was a monthly stream-of-consciousness sort of column by Jerry Pournelle, a science-fiction author who began writing his books on very early home word processing systems back in the 1970s. It was really a sort of proto-blog, where he wrote about his real-world experiences and offered long-term reviews of different hardware and software.

Thanks for a new Video. I like your videos a lot 🙏

10:56: You really needed the 64K for full Hercules compatibility. 32K might technically have sufficed for the resolution, but the Hercules supported two pages. RAM prices were falling fast at the time. Just a few years earlier, the 2600 made do with 128 bytes in the RIOT chip, then things went from that to a minimum of 16K RAM and 16K VRAM in the 5150, but only a few years after that, you had 64K on the Hercules or in the C64. EDIT: Oh. You mention this later. Minor correction though; I think they're saying B0000h was the 1st page and B8000h was the 2nd, not vice versa.

Fascinating! Thanks a lot! I think i had a paradise card on my first or second 286... Getting all nostalgic just thinking of all the noises those machines world make... The boot sequence... And my naive hopes of running this or that game which was outside my reach... Do i also remember a paradise text in the pile of manuals i had? Maybe it's about the time i played the amazing Another world/Out of this world... Twice... Was it 16 colors?

I used to have a very nice Compaq 386 slimline, including matching monitor and keyboard. I was using it as a 6502 cross-assembler and X1541 host until about 2000. I now have no memory of what I did with it, probably threw it out, but damn it was so sweet I wish I still had it.

Wow. Looks better than I thought.

Hi, still watching but my original Hercules card has 64k of RAM, so surely any card with Hercules compatibility will have the same amount. (Even if the color modes are no better than CGA like my VTECH MDA/CGA cards) Ah you figured this out later :-)

I used to play doom on a 386 DX 25! In low detal mode with the viewport slightly smaller was not too bad 😅

In text mode you can do multiple pages and hardware flicker free scrolling on a bog standard CGA. The snow problem on CGAs only affects early cards with RAM that isn't fast enough to handle CPU and refresh accesses in 80 column text modes. The snow would cause you problems even when reading/writing to pages outside of displayed RAM, so you'd still have to do updates only in sync periods even using double buffers. As someone else points out the 64K is for hercules compatibility which features 2 pages in graphics. Shame they didn't make it available for CGA modes.

This video earned my subscription to your channel. Awesome work!

If you are into digital electronics then this 8k bytes EPROM, generically known as the 2764, is very well known and made by many manufacturers. The letters in front of the 2764 varies by manufacturer. the letters and numbers following the 2764 indicate the package type and speed (access time).

The AT and EGA came out in 84, so 2 years before this card.

I'm trying to concentrate on the video, honest, but the highlight to me is that Compaq 386 and monitor setup.

What a funny coincidence! I happened to pick up one of these cards just a couple of weeks ago from a store that was closing down. Mine is a rev 3 but the layout looks almost exactly the same. I haven't fired it up yet though.

I was the head of jury for the "Outstanding Technical Achievement" category in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Meteoriks awards, I think I would have picked Area 5150 above every one of those, I think. Phenomenal job and sad that you won't be there this year :C

Damn, that's a blast from the past. That exact PC was my first PC. Although it might have been 33MHz. As a kid I reset the BIOS to default, so on every boot it would give en error and only let me use half of my RAM. Then discovered there was no way to enter the BIOS, at least that me or anyone I knew could find so I permanently crippledy PC. Does it need a boot disk or something for the BIOS? It would be great if someone could help solve this childhood mystery!

33:49 - Naah, you're picking up armor.

Haha wow! Doom on 386 w/EGA. Younger me would’ve been very appreciative of this in 1995 😂

I love this channel!

I would still play Doom like that back in the day

Nice smile at the beggining :D

FastDoom is ridiculously impressive! Despite a slightly shit card :P Weird to release the card without page flipping.

All I remember about the Paradise card is that I was glad I didn't have one. There were so many games that had a warning on them that they didn't work with a Paradise card. I was lucky to have an ordinary 256k VGA ISA 16 bit card.

Can it play Doom... yes it can!

Oh I remember the original Paradise cards, they were quite expensive back in the day.

Played doom on my 386 all the time. Had a svga card though.

With a fast CPU, Amiga's HAM mode can play Quake. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-btoU_CQSg7A.html Amiga 500's HAM mode is the same as Amiga 1000's 1985 era HAM mode.

AT&T 6300 compatibility claim is a curious one seeing as there's only a 16MHz oscillator on there. AFAIK the 400-line mode that was shared by the 6300 and a few clones / badge engineered sister machines used at least a 20MHz pixel clock, maybe 24MHz even. EGA pushes the limits somewhat to get 640x350 at 60Hz with that frequency, MAYBE you might be able to get 640x400 at 50Hz as well, but it likely wouldn't be too compatible with the official monitors rather than multisync (or an EGA one if you had a 50Hz-happy example)? Could you get detailed shots of the timing diagrams if it actually shows the details for those unusual high rez modes? edit: ah wait, your card is a PVC2 and the manual is for PVC4 ... presumably the latter would have had dual oscillators or something. There were enough typical super-EGAs (even some super-CGA/MDAs) that did that anyhow in order to give e.g. 132-column mode... So leveraging it in order to run 400-line instead would have been fairly trivial. edit2: yeah, there, tucked away on one of the quickly scrolled pages - it actually allows selection between three different clocks. Which wasn't too rare a config in the S-EGA days. Standard 16MHz, something in the 24-26MHz range which gave you 640x480 and wide textmode, and a comedy third option, e.g. 34MHz for 800x600 or perhaps something in-between the first two for, er, reasons? (And ofc if it can do clock dividing then you can try to share 32.5MHz between 800x600 and regular EGA, and have two other options available besides) edit3: and on the next page the examples are given of 14.318MHz (CGA / IBM motherboard standard, probably sourced direct from the ISA slot), 16.257MHz (MDA / EGA standard, though you could also use the Herc-standard 16.0), and 24.0MHz (Olivetti/AT&T, 132-col and ersatz VGA). The PVC2 clearly lacking the third option, and probably only being able to select between bus 14.318 and onboard 16, like a regular EGA would when swtiching modes. Plus there's also mention of needing dual bank memory to achieve effective 40ns / 25MHz operation ... so if you only have one bank (like this card probably does), you can only hit 16MHz anyway. Probably it alternates where it reads from and interleaves the waiting period, setting up the read from the second bank whilst still waiting for the first to respond... ....hmm i wonder if "2x 16K x8" for the two-bank memory mode is supposed to be 32K per bank, or total, given that a single chip is 64K? (as chip capacities increased by powers of 4 usually, you wouldn't see a single 32K x8 after all... so you'd have to pair up and have two per bank, probably?) Having "composite intensity" is interesting. That basically turns the video output into an analogue greyscale, though it may only be capable of 3 or 4 intensities (black, maybe dim, regular, and bright). And yeah Olivetti machines did have monochrome and colour monitors available, though they were still basically the same as CGA / MDA in most respects. I think I've seen a picture of them being able to natively simulate colour through greyscales on the monochrome ones, so that may be the purpose of having composite intensity, but the full colour ones were straight RGBI. The base spec of the machine's video system was to only have enough RAM (and generator board logic) to support black and white though, I think? Or possibly monochrome in hi-rez (32KB...) and colour (possibly even Plantronics grade) in lower resolutions. And you could add one, two, three additional 32K banks to have four, eight, sixteen colours in hi.

Misc notes: I wonder if the reason the page switching didn't work is because you didn't enable the 64k mapping. Maybe you can enable it by writing to where the hercules register should be after accounting for the io ports being in CGA space, or quickly switching between MDA and CGA modes and hoping the chip doesn't notice? If there's no snow, then the weird 640x100@4 tweakmode should actually work as intended -- no repeat columns. Also, I wonder if other tweakmodes are posible -- something with 16 colore comes to mind, and if video page swapping works, maybe interlaced video? It should be possible to figure out if any pin is composite: Flash a screen between all black and all white, then probe pins until one has alternating voltage. I wonder if the EGA+ rumors you talked about were early VGA prototypes -- after all, what is a VGA but a single-chip EGA with analog RGB output?

Way back in the day when I was specing out a computer to replace my Tandy 1000, I almost bought a Paradise card. I don't think it was that one. I felt limited by the Tandy 1000 graphics and I don't believe I would look at a card that wasn't at least EGA. I ended up getting an ATI VGA Wonder.

what's a complete mini rpg environment for pc (magazine ad)

Interesting how the PVC4 manual describes the CGA palette choice... "Blue on / blue off" and "Intensity on / off", which is of course what literally happens with the three "foreground" colours, and it's a more logical way of describing it, even if not quite as illustrative as the usual way of listing off the colours in the set... I wonder if it still gives you red/cyan/white if you mess around with the black-and-white / composite output flags in the previous register though? And I kinda think the medium-rez diagram has got a bit confused. Presumably in 640x200 for Plantronics you should have the exact same colour palettes and settings as CGA in 320x200 (as it was basically CGA with two extra bitplanes and very little other modification), rather than just a single "foreground intensity" selection? Or was it literally stuck in a single palette at all times, making the four colour ability even more limited than otherwise might have been expected? (And of course the palette settings mean basically nothing for Plantronics in 320x200, each bitplane mapping directly to an output bit in the monitor port) Shame mode 1-1 wasn't a 16 colour 160x200 like in the PCjr / Tandy, too. They could have more closely shared a quasi standard set of extended resolutions, then.

Very cool card, but it's sad you didn't get the EISA VGA that came with the system originally. (Compaq QVision 1024E) It's incredibly performant.

Neat video, but how is a card from 1986 "Pre-EGA"? (That came out in 1984 with the PC/AT, right?)

Hah my first PC was a Deskpro 386/20e - I did not like it one bit. These days, I have a full EISA 50M :D Not the greatest for playing games though.

where can i get a copy of doom and duke nukem3d?

6:10 What do you mean you're not allowed to accept donations? Almost every other channel does (LGR is a great example).

Yes I'm just a migrant here in the UK and can't earn any income of any kind outside of special categories defined by the Government. They are really worried migrants are going to take all the jobs or something like that.

You don't have to "sell" your videos to us with silly titles. Just my opinion. I've seen everything since late 1970's... But keep up the good work! Have you seen any VGA-card with Edsun Labs CEG-chip? (CEG=Continous Edge Graphics) As I know it was first chip (DAC) ever to implement anti-aliasing, but as far as I know there is NO actual VGA-card using it? Because I remember CEG in early 90's but VGA-cards developed (more RAM) very quickly so more memory meant no more need for such tweaks. PS. I read Jerry Pournelle from maybe 1984-85 to around 1992. Great columns!

My EuroPC has the PVC4 chip...if I knew that possibilities in 1988 man... I would have done much better in comparison with the Amiga/AtariST guys ;) As they saw "my machine" with PCSPK and regular 4color CGA they told me to throw that damn thing out of the window....but I did not ;)

Semi unrelated comment you've probably addressed: Why are 256k VGA cards not capable of 640x400x256? Is it a page thing? I think the first Macintosh LC did it.

There's a dancing tracking dot on your face in the facecam parts of the video. Nothing disturbing but I guess it's not something you actually want there :)

Interesting you say you're not allowed to accept donations. From whence is the interdiction? Have you taken a vow of computer junk poverty?

"high res" ok I think I stay with my VooDoo 3 The only enjoyable game on those old cards and hardware was Prince 1

Why can’t you take donations? I see many channel do mail call episodes with tons of boxes sent by viewers.

Why would you not be allowed to accept donations?

Why are you not allowed to accept donations?

Why are you not allow to accept donations?

Why are you not allowed to receive donations? Are you in a prison? I don't understand.

30 minutes of blah blah for 20 seconds of actual Doom port demo. Thumb down 👎