Thursday, October 15, 2020

ATI Mach 64 GX character generator failure

This is an PCI video card from ATI, based on the 210888GX00 Mach64 chip. I think it's a Graphics Pro Turbo. It is only designed to accelerate the Windows desktop, and was released well before 3D cards became common. To the right you see a 2 MB VRAM expansion board which plugs into the main board.

Here's the image produced by the card:

Note that this isn't just random garbage. It is a text mode screen. Some characters are blank and the rest are all the same horizontal lines. Colours are still there. This is a BIOS startup screen. At the top right you would see the Energy Star logo in yellow and EPA pollution preventer in green. Those graphics are created in text mode by changing some characters of the font and putting them there. So, both standard and user defined characters are wrong the same way.

It's weird that such a card failed while sitting unused in a PC for a long time. I don't know what's wrong with it. If anyone knows, leave a comment.

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