ATI VGA Wonder 16 Configuration Utilities

Dec 30, 2024 · 1 min read ·

I recently found an ATI VGA Wonder 16 ISA card in some of Dad's old stuff. This was actually pretty handy for me as I've been working on restoring an IBM 5150 and having a card that does MDA and VGA is pretty nice. The card was working well for me until I tried setting some settings using the ATI VINSTALL.EXE tool (version 4.2). After I did that I was unable to use the VINSTALL.EXE tool again as it threw an error:

1C:\ATIVGA>vinstall
2This Installation software doesn't support the video card(s) in your system.
3Please use ATi or ATi-compatible hardware.
4
5C:\ATIVGA>

I tried power cycling and other things but I could not get the VINSTALL utility to work again. I stumbled upon an older utility package that included these tools (version 1.02):

VCONFIG.COM - A tool for configuring the current video settings
VSETUP.COM - A tool for configuring system boot settings

Using the VSETUP.COM I was able to change settings and restore the card to it's previously working state.

I am providing a copy of these files here and also uploaded a copy to the Internet Archive.

ATI VGA Wonder 16 Configuration Utilities

References

https://archive.org/details/ativga
https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/ati-vga-wonder-16-looking-for-software-or-solution.1226442/
https://dosdays.co.uk/topics/Manufacturers/ati/ati_vga_wonder_16.php