The Small Wonder Graphics Solution does the same job as the Graphics Solution SR — running colour CGA games on a monochrome monitor — but the reason I wanted one was really about owning a piece of history. The 1988 Small Wonder (also sold as the Graphics Solution SC, for “single chip”) folds the SR’s discrete multi-chip design onto the ATI 18700, ATI’s first single-chip graphics IC. It arrived after my SR, and it’s the slightly newer, more refined card of the two, with a near-identical capability set.
What it does
- CGA graphics and text modes
- MDA and Hercules monochrome modes, including Hercules’ 720×348 high-res graphics
- CGA-on-MDA grayscale emulation — colour CGA output mapped to grey tones on a mono monitor, the same trick the Graphics Solution SR is built around
- standard 8-bit ISA, so it fits an original PC, XT, or early AT
- mode selection via DIP switches
My take
Purely on function, if you already have a Graphics Solution SR there’s no need for this one too — they do the same job, with the same caveat that the interlaced CGA-on-MDA mode flickers noticeably. What makes it worth having is what it represents: ATI’s first move from a boardful of discrete logic to a single custom chip, at the very start of the road that ran through EGA Wonder, VGA Wonder, Mach, and eventually Radeon.
