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Hercules is an odd pick for a vintage board recreation. Did the original card have anything that made it particularly special or interesting? Hercules Plus sup

Hercules is an odd pick for a vintage board recreation. Did the original card have anything that made it particularly special or interesting? Hercules Plus supported changing the text font without burning a ROM. As someone who never liked the original IBM PC font, that would have been a welcome feature before it came to EGA/VGA.

renewedrebecca 3y ago
IIRC, it had higher resolution than CGA, so it was much nicer to look at for longer stretches of time.
- jandrese 3y ago
  Also, it could display foreign characters in text mode unlike CGA cards. It was the serious business card of its day.
  - tpmx 3y ago
    Nitpicking: The CGA 8x8 font had a number of "foreign" (non-ascii) characters that could be displayed in 640x200 or 320x200 text modes. All (?) European though. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/viler-int10h/CGA-font-compare/images/compare.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/viler-int10h/CGA-font-comp... From IBM's technical manual: * 16 special characters for game support * 15 characters for word-processing editing support * 96 characters for the standard ASCII graphics set * 48 characters for foreign-language support * 48 characters for business block-graphics support (for the drawing of charts, boxes, and tables using single and double lines) * 16 selected Greek characters * 15 selected scientific-notation characters (https://minuszerodegrees.net/oa/OA%20-%20IBM%20Color%20Graphics%20Monitor%20Adapter%20(CGA).pdf https://minuszerodegrees.net/oa/OA%20-%20IBM%20Color%20Graph...) ...although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#Internationalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#Internationaliza... reaches the conclusion that it only e.g. English, Germany and Swedish are fully supported due the lack of upper-case accented latin characters. Huh, TIL.
    - fatneckbeard 3y ago
      CGA font were never re-programmable, Hercules (after a certain version) were.
- tomcam 3y ago
  720x348. It was a dream for programming and writing.
  - bombcar 3y ago
    If I recall correctly I has original SimCity on Hercules which was nice if only black and white (amber and gray).
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    And no flicker at all, due to how the monitor worked.
- Jeema101 3y ago
  In addition, a lot of the lower-end CGA monitors at the time didn't have real great native resolution (i.e. the 'dot pitch'). They would generally be fine for playing games in low res mode, but not that great for doing business work in high res mode. The better CGA monitors had finer dot pitch, but those were usually more expensive.
skipkey 3y ago
When doing development for Windows in the early Windows 3 days, if you had a Hercules card and monitor in addition to a VGA one you could run the debugger on the Hercules. This was a much nicer setup than debugging everything on the VGA.
- mmastrac 3y ago
  This worked for any mono card. Mono was at segment 0xb000, Colour text was at 0xb800, VGA was at 0xa000. I used to run Turbo Debugger on one monitor, and commercial games I was fiddling with in various ways on the other. You could break into code without disrupting the VGA registers.
userbinator 3y ago
Might just be because it's a decently high resolution, and easier than an EGA/VGA.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  In 1982, that was a huge upgrade at the time. CGA’s graphic mode as 320x240. Hercules’ graphic mode resolution was 720 × 348. EGA didn’t arrive for two more years. Anyone doing graphics before EGA would use Hercules cards. Even once EGA arrived, while it did add 16 colors, the resolution was only 640 × 350 in color mode. If you were doing CAD, every pixel counted.

renewedrebecca 3y ago

IIRC, it had higher resolution than CGA, so it was much nicer to look at for longer stretches of time.

jandrese 3y ago
Also, it could display foreign characters in text mode unlike CGA cards. It was the serious business card of its day.
- tpmx 3y ago
  Nitpicking: The CGA 8x8 font had a number of "foreign" (non-ascii) characters that could be displayed in 640x200 or 320x200 text modes. All (?) European though. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/viler-int10h/CGA-font-compare/images/compare.gif https://raw.githubusercontent.com/viler-int10h/CGA-font-comp... From IBM's technical manual: * 16 special characters for game support * 15 characters for word-processing editing support * 96 characters for the standard ASCII graphics set * 48 characters for foreign-language support * 48 characters for business block-graphics support (for the drawing of charts, boxes, and tables using single and double lines) * 16 selected Greek characters * 15 selected scientific-notation characters (https://minuszerodegrees.net/oa/OA%20-%20IBM%20Color%20Graphics%20Monitor%20Adapter%20(CGA).pdf https://minuszerodegrees.net/oa/OA%20-%20IBM%20Color%20Graph...) ...although https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#Internationalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437#Internationaliza... reaches the conclusion that it only e.g. English, Germany and Swedish are fully supported due the lack of upper-case accented latin characters. Huh, TIL.
  - fatneckbeard 3y ago
    CGA font were never re-programmable, Hercules (after a certain version) were.
tomcam 3y ago
720x348. It was a dream for programming and writing.
- bombcar 3y ago
  If I recall correctly I has original SimCity on Hercules which was nice if only black and white (amber and gray).
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  And no flicker at all, due to how the monitor worked.
Jeema101 3y ago
In addition, a lot of the lower-end CGA monitors at the time didn't have real great native resolution (i.e. the 'dot pitch'). They would generally be fine for playing games in low res mode, but not that great for doing business work in high res mode. The better CGA monitors had finer dot pitch, but those were usually more expensive.

skipkey 3y ago

When doing development for Windows in the early Windows 3 days, if you had a Hercules card and monitor in addition to a VGA one you could run the debugger on the Hercules. This was a much nicer setup than debugging everything on the VGA.

mmastrac 3y ago
This worked for any mono card. Mono was at segment 0xb000, Colour text was at 0xb800, VGA was at 0xa000. I used to run Turbo Debugger on one monitor, and commercial games I was fiddling with in various ways on the other. You could break into code without disrupting the VGA registers.

userbinator 3y ago

Might just be because it's a decently high resolution, and easier than an EGA/VGA.

Tagbert 3y ago
In 1982, that was a huge upgrade at the time. CGA’s graphic mode as 320x240. Hercules’ graphic mode resolution was 720 × 348. EGA didn’t arrive for two more years. Anyone doing graphics before EGA would use Hercules cards. Even once EGA arrived, while it did add 16 colors, the resolution was only 640 × 350 in color mode. If you were doing CAD, every pixel counted.