The CGA 320x200 graphics mode is horrible to program for and would have made a 512 byte implementation much harder to accomplish. Even and odd rows of pixels on

The CGA 320x200 graphics mode is horrible to program for and would have made a 512 byte implementation much harder to accomplish. Even and odd rows of pixels on screen are separated in memory by 8k bytes, for instance. VGA mode 0x13, on the other hand, is widely known as the easiest graphics mode to program for -- all you do is throw bytes one after the other into 0x8000 + 64K and you're immediately putting 256-color graphics on the screen. 8-bit compatible VGA cards are somewhat of a rarity to find nowadays but it wasn't entirely uncommon to see 8088 or 8086 systems paired with VGA cards in the late 80's, although generally they were more common and useful with a 286 and up.