Dual Monitors in DOS

[Fat Tone]

A colleague wants dual (clone) monitors on an old 486, with only ISA cards. My advice is to use a vga splitter, but does anyone know if it is possible using more than one ISA graphics card?

TIA

T.

[Zao]

I don't think it will be possible.
There are multimonitor solutions with a monochrome display card at b000:0000, but they can only display b/w text and the app has to be coded to use it. It's mainly for debugging old-school gfx code.

[Fat Tone]

Thanks Zao - I didn't think it was possible either. A £25 splitter is the way to go here.

Cheers

T.

[UtwigMU]

I recall seing a dual monitor setup on some computer show in 1994 or so.

The thing was running Windows 3.1, dual 17" monitors and ant drawing from CorelDraw4 was open.

I also remember a guy who was autocadding on dual 21"s with dual Millenniums PCI in 1996 on P90.

[Marshmallowman]

There is a dual screen console driver for linux?, idon't know if it would work for old stuff tho.

As I recall you can put in two video cards in dos, but unless the application knows how to use the second card you are not going to get anywhere....

[Fat Tone]

I once had a simillar problem back in the days of DOS. I had an 8086 HP Vectra running a whole host of scientific kit, mostly over the original IEEE bus. The kit was for measuring the reflectance of surfaces so had to be in a light-tight room, and we needed to know what was going on from outside the room. My solution was to build a 32*2 character LCD display with a simple RS232 interface, put a cable through the wall, and write all the relevant info to this. I'm not going to volunteer this time though because I don't want to get into modifying his software.

Ah....those were the days.

Cheers guys

T.