More about the Commodore 286

There is much more to tell about my Commodore 286. I think most of you would think that replacing a greyscale VGA monitor to color VGA is what the system needs most. Sure, I would have liked a color VGA but I really wanted sound card even more after hearing Sound Blaster on my friends 386sx.

Funny thing about PC speaker is that somehow it always felt that PCs are supposed to sound like that. Some friends had Commodore 64 or Amiga and sure, they sounded a lot better than PC. Even my NES sounded better than PC but I didn't know anyone who would have sound card until my friend got one. I knew what sound cards were because I had read about them from computer magazines but hearing Sound Blaster for very first time was something completely different.

Sound Blaster is huge improvement over PC speaker. So huge that nothing ever came close, except adding Gravis Ultrasound ACE next to Sound Blaster. PCI sound cards with environmental effects and 3D sounds are only minor upgrades by comparison. Roland MT-32/CM-32L/LAPC-I would have been far more greater upgrade than Sound Blaster but for me (and for most people) Roland was just a dream.

So I bought a Sound Blaster 2.0 to my Commodore 286 with greyscale VGA. Sound Blaster 2.0 was the best I could afford. It was in retail box and came with Lemmings and Indianapolis 500. I had both of them already (copies, naturally). I was able to install the card but never got sound from it. Don't laugh but I didn't know sound cards require external speakers. I just somehow assumed that external speakers were optional and internal speaker was used when there were no external speakers.

When I wrote about my first computer, I didn't mention that it broke at one time. Fortunately a television and electronics repairer lived nearby (he worked at home) and was able to fix my Trifunic. The same repairer fixed my IBM EGA 5154 monitor couple of years ago and other things over the years. He took a look at the sound card problem and told that external speakers were required when I couldn't get sound after getting the Commodore back (I didn't know external speakers were required so I never thought to mention I tried to get sound without speakers). We had some old Philips mono speaker and the repairer replaced the connector so I was able to use the speaker. Computer speakers at that time were very small but my mono speaker was quite big. I think the speaker element was perhaps 4 inch.

The repairer saw that I had greyscale monitor and told he had the same kind of color monitor. He didn't need it and he offered to replace it with my greyscale monitor. WOW! I didn't have to think too long about offer like that (thank you once again). So now I had color monitor and sound card.

The color monitor was IBM 8513, a 12” VGA monitor. Externally it looks just like the IBM greyscale VGA. You may think 12” is small but it is even smaller than you might think. Old IBM monitors had large black borders around the picture so the picture is perhaps only 10”. Even today I happen to have IBM 8513 (not the same unit) and I must say that it produces damn fine picture for gaming usage, especially the colors are very bright and there are no geometry flaws that later CRT monitors used to have.

I sold a 15” Forefront DH-1570 monitor three months ago (along with the 486 I was building). I've kept the monitor for many years because 15” is just about the perfect size for CRT (no scanlines with low res games and the monitor itself fits on a table nicely, unlike 17” or ever bigger CRTs). The Forefront also happens to be the first monitor I've ever bought new (in 1996) and it had less geometry flaws than any of the CRT monitors I bought after it (17” Sony and 19” Samsung).

As much as I liked about the Forefront I just had to accept that the 12” IBM produces much better picture. Bright colors makes a huge difference (and I'm the one who used to play with grayscale monitor). So I gave away the Forefront because we were moving. I hope to find 14” or 15” high end CRT monitor, perhaps Sony or multisync NEC. I'm definitely not going to give away the IBM.

But back to the Commodore 286. It never received new upgrades after color monitor and sound card so the specs were:

• 286 12 MHz
• 1 MiB RAM
• 40 MB Quantum ProDrive 40AT
• 3,5" and 5,25" HD Floppy Drives
• Sound Blaster 2.0
• Integrated Paradise VGA (PVGA1A)
• 12” IBM 8513 color VGA monitor

Those are good specs. In fact 286 is my favorite PC processor ever (more about it some other time). You might not believe but 12 MHz 286 is fast enough for just about all 16 bit DOS games. I remember that Larry 6 was very slow but playable. I don't remember any other game being slower than that. CPU does not deserve all the glory since Paradise was one of the better VGA chips. Having a Trident in place and gaming would have been certainly a less pleasant.

I really miss the Commodore 286. Perhaps even more than Trifunic and certainly a lot more than any of the clone systems that came after the Commodore.

My second computer

I haven't forgotten my blog (I can't believe its almost three months since my last message). I've simply been too busy to even answer emails so writing a blog was not possible. Believe it or not, I'm writing this first on a paper because I don't have time to write it at home. Of course I'll have to type all this to computer but I hope it will take less time than typing while thinking what to write.

This is a good time to write about my second computer. I had to sell my Trifunic XT and 8-bit Nintendo but instead of buying a new computer, I bought little used SNES! I don't remember where I got the money for the Commodore 286 (I never sold the SNES) but I bought it quite soon after the SNES.

I remember the Commodore specs very well but I do not remember the model, and no, I sadly don't have any picture of this computer either.

The specs were:

• 286 12 MHz
• 1 MB RAM
• Integrated Paradise VGA (PVGA1A)
• 40 MB Quantum ProDrive 40AT
• 3,5" and 5,25" HD Floppy Drives

I've always regretted that I gave away all my 5,25" floppies with Trifunic XT. 5,25" floppies eventually proved to be more reliable. No wonder since less data is stored on a larger area. And I like the look, fell and sound of 5,25" floppies more than 3,5" disks.

What about monitor? That was greyscale IBM VGA. There is a small story behind it. I bought the Commodore from a small store selling new and used computers. On the same street there was another store like it. It was called Visiotek. Over the years many small computer stores born and died but Visiotek remained longer than any of the other stores I used to visit. Visiotek was never the cheapest but it had largest amount of used computers and items. Even as late as 2002 I bought a nice 486 system from there (that became what is now my gaming 486). Three years later you couldn't get anything older than Pentium 2 or 3 from there (it is very surprising that they even sold 486 systems as late as 2002). Maybe internet with cheap online stores, auction sites etc was too much but it was sad to see Visiotek wither away.

But back to the greyscale IBM VGA. It cost 400 Finnish Mark and I think so did the Commodore (very close anyway). I carried them to bus station that was nearby. First I carried the Commodore on a bag over a short distance and then the monitor (and so on).

I suppose I'm one of the few that has used greyscale VGA monitor for gaming. My cousin once asked why since my previous computer had color display (CGA). The greyscale VGA is without a doubt an improvement over the CGA. There are only a handful of games where I missed the CGA colors and those games mostly were CGA only games with well selected colors. Greyscale VGA allowed me to play all those EGA and VGA games I always wanted.

There are limitations with greyscale VGA. VGA can display 256 colors simultaneously. Each color has 6 bits for red, green and blue each, so full palette is 18 bits or 262,144 colors. But greyscale VGA monitor has only one beam, not three. So it can only display 64 (6 bits) shades of gray (black and white included). VGA BIOS is wise. It detects (or should detect, at least it can be forced by software) greyscale monitor and enables algorithm called greyscale summing. It is a technique for making sure that monitor displays as many different shades as possible, or more properly makes sure completely different colors are not displayed as same gray.

Many games do not use BIOS for setting colors (they write directly to VGA registers) and it causes a problem. For example some shades of red and blue turn out to be the same dark grey when greyscale summing is not used. Many Sierra games have driver for greyscale VGA monitors and it does the summing. Graphics look much better when the greyscale driver is used.

I didn't have the greyscale VGA for long. It was replaced with IBM Color VGA. Externally it looked identical to the greyscale VGA monitor. I'll tell more about it in my next blog entry and also about my first sound card.

My first computer

I'd like to tell something about my first computer. I don't have any pictures from it and I can't remember was is year 1990 or 1991 when I got it (I was 10 or 11 years old then). More likely 1990 because I think I got NES as Christmas present on 1989 (I was hoping for a computer).

My first computer was quite generic XT clone build in AT clone case used by many PC XT/AT clones. Brand of my first computer was Trifunic and it was assembled in Finland.

I remember the specs very well. I learned a lot with and from this computer. Monitor was IBM 5153 CGA display. I can't remember was the keyboard IBM as well but I do remember it was 84-key XT keyboard. Trifunic didn't come with mouse but I got one later.

Other specs were:

• 8 MHz Turbo Board with NEC V20 processor
• 640 kiB RAM
• 100 % compatible CGA clone adapter
• Seagate ST-225 20 MB MFM hard drive
• 720k 3.5” Floppy Drive
• 360k 5.25” Floppy Drive
• Multi I/O card of some sort (it did have serial port to plug the mouse in)

As you might have guessed by now, system like that bought in 1990 must mean it was previously owned and it was. Nobody had slower PC and I couldn't play many of the games my friends did. I always wanted new computer back then but now I'm glad what I got. It made possible for me to start from XT systems and feel the progress of PC hardware and games from the beginning.

Friends dad did some work with computers and through him I got the Trifunic. At their place I saw a PC for the very first time. I don't know it's specs other that it was also XT clone. It had amber display that looked so amazing.

Before I got the Trifunic I was told it had color display, and it did. CGA is able to display 4 colors in graphics modes. We were at my friends place to test the computer for the first time (my friends dad must have installed DOS and some games in it). Digger was the very first game we tried on it and it looked and worked great. King's Quest III was the second game we tried and it appeared black and white! What a disappointment. There was key combination to switch to color mode but that was even more disappointment. King's Quest III looked so much better in amber display, not to mention in real color display.

About the same time my friends dad got 386sx system with VGA. No need to guess where we played all the games after school.

I didn't know back then but Sierra's AGI games support CGA composite output. I'm sure I had one in my Trifunic but even if I had known it, I wouldn’t have anything to plug it in. European PAL televisions back then didn't support NTSC and even if they would have, I had black and white TV for the NES. RGB Output in AGI games were always black and white or 4 color mode with quite awful palette so I used the B&W mode. Later SCI games from Sierra had much better CGA RGB color support.

And those I mostly played on my Trifunic; every Sierra game that run on it. It didn't matter that the copy of KQ3 had disk 2 missing or Larry 3 was corrupted so that it always froze when entering bamboo forest. Or that I only knew one phone number from Larry 2 (3425, can't forget it) so it took a while to get in the game.

Other games I played were Lucasfilms Indy 3 (I'm one of the few who thinks Last Crusade is better game than Fate of Atlantis but Atlantis didn't work on my Trifunic, of course), Monkey Island and Zak McKracken.

Then I really spend many hours on Prince of Persia (one of the best games ever), SimCity and Ducktales. Again it didn't matter how slow they were as long as they supported CGA.

If a game worked slow back then it didn't mean slow frame rate like today. When game was slow, the character was moving slower that it supposed to. In my opinion that is better alternative than slow frame rate (actually the frame rate was slow as well but it feels completely different on 2D games than on 3D games).

I wanted to let you know how my PC gaming started because that certainly affects what I consider to be “best” retro gaming XT system.