Investigating Hercules/CGA modes of Amstrad PC1640 with GBS-8200 

Just now seeing this for some reason. Better late than never. I like the video. You are quite an artist I see. Anyway, great to see Planet X3 running on another Plantronics capable computer. I think there are more of them out there than people realize!

This is just what the doctor ordered! Thanks for the really comprehensive coverage of signals and how to get brown!

Can't believe my dumb little cga test program is still being used :-) Nice overview, keep up the good work. I use a gglabs cga2rgb unit myself.

Using paint programs for the intended purpose, I see.

The Genoa SuperEGA 912x480 / 16 color mode surely looks interesting and that Hercules Incolor 720x348 / 16 color mode also! Writing a game for those modes would be a cool thing to do! (just saying)

Awesome vid man.

I had a PC1640 ECD (HD20) that had an EGA display. I seem to recall I was able to choose 256k EGA in games that supported it. It was a nice PC at the time considering the ones I used in school mostly had orange/green monochrome monitors.

Hi TheRasteri! It's a very nice video, thank you for sharing it. I was inspired by your work and found another very interesting and simple way (as I think) how to combine CGA/EGA with GBS-8200 class devices. I tried it already and my idea works quite good so far. I'm currently making a video too and would like to open source my work. So far I got CGA and EGA working, but on top of my idea, theoretically I could also do MGA/Hercules conversion as well. I already did the prototype and it seems to work on the oscilloscope, however, as I planned the whole thing I didn't realize, that MGA/Hercules do work at 18.43kHz and, as far as I can see now GBS-8200 only works at 14.5-16.5K, 23.5-25.5K and 30.5-32.5K. Do you have some experience to share about it? Is it possible to run GBS-8200 at 18.43K somehow?

hello, I have a PC1640 with MD monitor but I cannot set CGA emulation mode. Hercules is working fine but very few games support Hercules and I would like to use CGA (even if in grey scale); do you have any suggestion?

The screenshots of the CGA version of Lemmings at MobyGames show the same colors.

Hello, I have an amstrad pc 1512 with a broken monitor, but if the power supply works, there is some way to connect it to another monitor, be it vga, rca or otherwise, just as long as the image is visible, it's fine, thanks

6:36 Wouldn't it help to use a separate comparator for each color channel to maintain the delay for all channels? At least for the green channel you could use a comparator.

DeviantOllam sent me here.

7:08 You earned your Like.

My memory of the Amstrad is that it was green graphics on a black screen. Not so? Rather white on black? As I'm working on a book in which the Amstrad screen gets a mention I'd be glad of confirmation, pretty please?

You guys had the Amstrad - we had the brilliant Tandy 1000, which had reasonable color graphics and sound for gaming while being way more affordable than IBM PC and avoided all the brain-dead mistakes of the IBM PC Jr

7:17 WoW how even that is possible on CGA ?

noice

Hmm, the breadboard wiring contains a subliminal message. The RU-vid algorithm won't get it. Heehee.

4:39 Okay, I'll admit, I laughed.

I don't often laugh out loud at videos on you tube but the deeply disturbing comment on Sly definitely bucked that trend.

5:51 :D

i was warranty tech support in Australia for these PCs . They were built to a very low price, the monitors were absolute CRAP. if you have a monitor that has a fan for the Power supply, you can thank me. It was my feedback to QA dept. that convince the manufacturer to add the little fan.