To LUGNET HomepageTo LUGNET News HomepageTo LUGNET Guide Homepage
 Help on Searching
 
Post new message to lugnet.off-topic.geekOpen lugnet.off-topic.geek in your NNTP NewsreaderTo LUGNET News Traffic PageSign In (Members)
 Off-Topic / Geek / 3649
3648  |  3650
Subject: 
Graphics cards on the PC (was some pansy mac stuff
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.geek
Date: 
Thu, 18 Apr 2002 22:19:49 GMT
Viewed: 
565 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.geek, William R. Ward writes:
foxtrot@cc.gatech.edu (J.D. Forinash) writes:
In article <m2elhd6hfd.fsf@komodo.home.wards.net>,
William R Ward  <bill@wards.net> wrote:
So put a Hercules MDA video card in it!  :-) (That's the old
monochrome standard, from the days when color monitors were rare on
PC's.)

Which one's the standard? :) The MDA was the original PC display adapter
(stood for, amazingly enough, Monochrome Display Adapter) and didn't
do graphics at all. Two color, text only, 80x25.

Since Hercules is a superset of MDA, I thought "Hercules MDA" was the
full name.  It is, after all, a monochrome display adapter!

Hercules, on the other hand, was a different spec and did in fact allow
pixel-addressed monochrome graphics. It was pretty wildly popular even
after CGA came out, since it allowed a monstrous 720x350 or so, where CGA
was four-color 320x200.

My old EGA card (by a clone brand) had a Hercules emulation mode and I had
some games that used it!

I've got a CGA card that's truly frightening - it's an 8-bit ISA card
that is full of 74xx chips.  It takes up the entire maximum card size
of the AT case.  You know how they always had those rails for holding
cards waaay over on the other end of the motherboard, but very few
cards were long enough to reach them?  This one reaches them.  I
actually used it for a while on a 386 when I was running a BBS.  It
works great with monitors for the Commodore 128.  But I thought tha
CGA was 16 color 320x200.  You sure it was only 4-color?

Yes. 4 colors at a time, but you could choose which 4 from two possible
palettes. Red/Green/Blue/Black or Cyan/Magenta/Yellow/Black, if I recall
correctly. It's been a long time though, and I skipped CGA, I went from MDA
straight to EGA on my old XT.



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: review: Radeon 7000 for BrickDraw3D, low-end Mac
 
(...) Since Hercules is a superset of MDA, I thought "Hercules MDA" was the full name. It is, after all, a monochrome display adapter! (...) I've got a CGA card that's truly frightening - it's an 8-bit ISA card that is full of 74xx chips. It takes (...) (22 years ago, 18-Apr-02, to lugnet.off-topic.geek)

26 Messages in This Thread:







Entire Thread on One Page:
Nested:  All | Brief | Compact | Dots
Linear:  All | Brief | Compact
    

Custom Search

©2005 LUGNET. All rights reserved. - hosted by steinbruch.info GbR