so i picked up this 286 PC the other day based solely on the fact that it included a WYSE WY-700 graphics card and monitor, a kind of fucked up event in itself since you never find both of those in the same room. opened it up to see what was inside before i bought it, and was just dumbstruck.
"You gotta give that shootin' iron some thought," I said to myself.
the wyse wy700 has 128K of RAM. that's about 1.02 megapixels, and so is the Wyse's 1280x800, so this card delivers an incredibly crisp windows or CAD interface in brilliant 1-bit color, using a long-persistence P171 phosphor to cover up the low scan rate. it ostensibly updates at 69.4Hz, but that's interlaced, so I believe each set of lines is only updated at 33.9Hz; there is visible jitter, but it's really not too bad. There are also quite significant screen trails, but that hardly matters when the concept of animation isn't really on the table. Pushing a megapixel with no hardware blitting is a rough scene, and screen updates are sluggish, to put it mildly.
Given that this card has no EGA emulation, you weren't going to play games on it anyway. It's for DTP and CAD, per the ads, and for those it's perfect. COLUMBIA.DWG looks incredibly chrisp, though you can clearly see that the circuitry is... not pushing the beam as hard as it once did. It's a bit dim. Crisp as fuck though.
And of course, while the card can be set up as your only display, you can also jumper it to only look at its own defined area of memory, and then pair it with any conventional card - in my case, EGA provides the textmode interface to AutoCAD while the Wyse handles the high resolution drawing, as god intended.
...of course, there are a FEW games you can play on it, such as the flight simulator that microsoft made. The card emulates CGA and MDA (but not hercules :/) and converts CGA's four color palette into four shades of grey. It's quite striking, given that the maskless monitor has nearly infinite resolution; there is no "tooth" to the image whatsoever, and it almost feels like it's been bicubic-upscaled.
Textmode is also a little breathtaking. The ROM font is a colossal 16x16, the largest I'm aware of on... anything, so text looks really, really good, particularly in CGA's "low resolution" mode.
