The trick was pretty easy to guess but still a lot of fun to see put into practice. The EGA monitor bits, and more broadly just the idea of trading color bit depth to multiplex signals for multiple monitors into a single framebuffer and physical output is pretty cool. The Windows display driver idea actually implemented on real hardware would be tons of fun. I could have seen products actually doing this "back in the day" to do multi-head setups. I'm kinda surprised examples don't exist.
BTW this was done in the day when drawing pixels on a screen was all done via the CPU telling the card "draw /this/ pixel with /this/ color". Good times!
It used to be a big thing in the nineties: I've got old .asm source code of mine where I used to do that.
But somehow LLMs love to insert dashes everywhere: dashes in source code an em-dashes in prose. Just why?
Did they parse lots of early code and thought it was cool to insert, in modern programming languages, comment lines full of dashes?
> Another fun one: comments that are justified to a specific column but off by one in only one of them.
Oh yes, all the time. And besides the fact that there are the off-by-ones errors, it of course looks horrible in Claude Code CLI seen that what you see is not what the LLM did output (because they vibe-coded their "real time game engine" that changes characters, for no reason, on the fly).
It's 2026 and we've got "intelligent" machines doing this:
// -------------------------
// ------------------------
// ----- Input Handling ----
// ------------------------
// |--------------+-------+------|
// | Potentiometer | Min | Max |
// |--------------+-------+------|
ascii_table_to_unicode_mismatch_alignment_fixer(...);
I suspect this is also how LLM prose gets so utterly bad.
Of course, for indentation and ASCII graphics, it would be less prone to breaking constantly in this way if it were not a next-token predictor.
In Karl Guttag's recent talk on the 34010 (VCFSW YouTube channel) he mentions being contacted by Bloomberg for their multi-up terminal. When it shipped in the early 90s, it was the first dual display system I'd seen. Wall Street later began buying 4-display Matrox cards.
Didn't realize how wholesome 8bit guy is, great channel.
So like most of the gadgets from the 90s.
It might have been easy to guess, but you didn't really think of it in the past 51 years since the Commodore 128 was introduced, did you?
I went from a VIC20 to C64 then to a C128D in 1987. Then moved a 486DX50 running OS/2 in 1990.
This would have been quite the product then. TVs were expensive, but B&W TVs not so much.
It would have the benefit of working with NTSC, PAL, composite, and other output signals that don't breakout RGBI components on separate pins. But it would have the downside of only supporting 3 monitors instead of 4 (can't color filter on intensity). And of course each monitor would look red, green, or blue according to their filter.