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From: aharon@wisdom.BITNET (Aharon Shtull-Trauring)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: problems with Hercules compatible card
Message-ID: <8701200750.AA26234@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: Tue, 20-Jan-87 02:50:49 EST
Article-I.D.: ucbvax.8701200750.AA26234
Posted: Tue Jan 20 02:50:49 1987
Date-Received: Tue, 20-Jan-87 22:38:54 EST
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
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Hi.  I am the (not so) proud owner of a Taiwanese PC-Clone
which my wife uses for her word-processing, editing and
translating business.  I bought a Hercules "compatible"
card as well as a CGA "compatible" card - the latter
for running games for my kids.  I have several
problems:

(1) When the CGA card is in the computer, the Hercules
card acts as if its brain damaged.  Letters looked half-baked
and are unreadable.  The documentation (which reads as if
it was written by a Taiwanese who only knew Urdu) for the
monochrome graphics card says that the card has 2 32K buffers
of graphics memory, and that if you wnat it to live
peacably with a CGA card you must disable page 1 by
running a program called half (or else sending something
to a register via basic).  None of these things seem
to help or hinder.

(2) In monochrome mode, when I do a dir, my monitor
starts raining Greek letters.  This is especialy
noticeable when I go into Turbo mode (I have a 8088-2
that can run at 8+ MHZ).  I thought the card may have
some sort of refresh problem, but running th Borland
graphics toolbox demo works beautifully, even at 8 MHZ
(in fact it of course looks much better running at 8MHZ)

(3) My wife uses the Hercules card for Microsoft Word.
When she runs a disk that has system 2.1 or higher the
Hercules card does strange things while in word.  It
only works 100% properly when booting of a disk
with 2.0 (the command.com can be 2.11)

Help!!!  Can Hercules live with CGA and is it just my clone
that stinks, or is there some vital piece of information
that the "technical wizards" who sold me this clunker
just don't know (or aren't saying).

On another topic, I would like to understand the difference
between different density diskettes.  It doesn't seem to
matter if I use single-sided double density or double-sided
double-density - I stillo get 360K.  Why?

Any help would be most appreciated:

                                Aron Shtull-Trauring
                                (aharon@wisdom.bitnet)
                                (aharon%wisdom.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu)