5 ms·

If memory serves, I had a neighbor who bought that 4MB Emulex card. It was for an 80286 clone that had a 10MB HDD. His rational for buying this card was "I ca

by mdip 3y ago

If memory serves, I had a neighbor who bought that 4MB Emulex card. It was for an 80286 clone that had a 10MB HDD. His rational for buying this card was "I can make a big RAM drive out of it and run everything from memory" I can't recall the price of the thing, but I want to say it ran in the thousands. Couldn't run most games on it because of copy protection so we never got to take advantage of it. In fact, I don't think the extra memory was usable at all in most software -- I recall we couldn't run a game on his machine due to having 512MB of onboard memory, but it had no issue in my ancient 8088 with 640K installed (in bizarre CGA colors).

StressedDev 3y ago
CGA was the worst. EGA and VGA were huge improvements because CGA only had 4 ugly colors, while EGA had 16 (good), and VGA had 256 (much better). VGA also supported pallets I think (a way of allowing an application to use 256 colors out of 16 million supported colors).
- moefh 3y ago
  Nitpick: the VGA DAC has 6 bits per RGB component (18 bits total), so each of the 256 colors is chosen out of 2^18 = 262,144 colors, not 16 million.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  > CGA only had 4 ugly colors 16 colors, technically. But only four at a time, and three of those were selected from two preset palettes, both of which were hideous (one green/red/brown, one cyan/magenta/white).
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    And EGA had 64, because while its display output pins where still TTL, there was no longer a single intensity bit (RGBI) like in CGA but individual intensity bits wired for each color component (rRgGbB)
- glandium 3y ago
  And yet... https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/ https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-... (this was resubmitted here a few days ago)
- mdip 3y ago
  You nailed it with "4 ugly colors"[0] I remember the palette choices in CGA were downright bizarre; they'd be 4 colors that you couldn't possibly use to make anything look right. At the price of the card and the display, you're like "wait ... that's it?" [0] Ignoring all of the interesting things coming out of the 8088 demo scene, nothing that I'm aware of from the 80s was capable of anything close to that.

by mdip 3y ago

StressedDev 3y ago

CGA was the worst. EGA and VGA were huge improvements because CGA only had 4 ugly colors, while EGA had 16 (good), and VGA had 256 (much better). VGA also supported pallets I think (a way of allowing an application to use 256 colors out of 16 million supported colors).

moefh 3y ago
Nitpick: the VGA DAC has 6 bits per RGB component (18 bits total), so each of the 256 colors is chosen out of 2^18 = 262,144 colors, not 16 million.
duskwuff 3y ago
> CGA only had 4 ugly colors 16 colors, technically. But only four at a time, and three of those were selected from two preset palettes, both of which were hideous (one green/red/brown, one cyan/magenta/white).
- rzzzt 3y ago
  And EGA had 64, because while its display output pins where still TTL, there was no longer a single intensity bit (RGBI) like in CGA but individual intensity bits wired for each color component (rRgGbB)
glandium 3y ago
And yet... https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-illustrated/ https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-... (this was resubmitted here a few days ago)
mdip 3y ago
You nailed it with "4 ugly colors"[0] I remember the palette choices in CGA were downright bizarre; they'd be 4 colors that you couldn't possibly use to make anything look right. At the price of the card and the display, you're like "wait ... that's it?" [0] Ignoring all of the interesting things coming out of the 8088 demo scene, nothing that I'm aware of from the 80s was capable of anything close to that.