The 256 Color Revolution | Retro Dream
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2024
- 1991 opened a new era for PC/DOS games, which were now running in native VGA 256 colors... Let's have a closer look on this key period and the advent of the new standard for computers of the past!
#Retrogaming #Videogames #Retro #Computers #MSDOS #DOSgames #Retrogamer #Bigboxgame #Retrocollection #VGA
We lived the magic era of gaming 🙂
Precisely.
I had a 286 with Hercules monitor bought in 1990 and upgraded it to a VGA in '92... It was amazing, incredible, entering to a new world. The first game I tried with my new VGA was Elvira the RPG game. I also think 1991 was revolutionary for the PC. One of the best years in PC gaming and in my life too. Happy memories!!
Thanks for sharing and for your interest!
Did you update monitor only or video card also ?
@@andreylapshov9418 both, monitor and video card. Hercules video card was not compatible with VGA monitors, only with Hercules monitors. So I had to upgraded the videocard to a Trident VGA with 512K of VRAM and a Samsung VGA monitor (there were no SVGA monitors yet).
The 256 color threshold was pretty big. The 386 processor really took it to a new level. The PC’s were finally able to why Amiga computers had been doing since 1985.
Exactly.
In 1991, 386 + vga cost huge money.
@gd515051 No they couldn't. Take a look at a list of the top A500 SHMUPS and compare what was being done on the PC at the time and the Amiga beats the pants off a 386 with VGA. The only area a 386 looked good was in 3D but that was still only against a machine costing a fraction of the A500 but against a competing 68030 Amiga it had nothing. It took until 1991 till the real gaming challenge came to the Amiga A500 (but really the A1000 from 1985) a machine that was now costing a fraction of the price of a current PC.
For me, it was ultima 6. The first game me and my friends at the time ever saw in 256 color mode, and, with full adlib / sound blaster support. Making it (at the time) the most astonishing multimedia and gaming experience!
Oh yes for me too Ultima VI was one of the first.
This brought back so many memories! Wow! Very cool
I was born in 2002 but I'm grateful that these masterpieces still nowadays witness the wonders of old technology: they are amazing!
Thank you for sharing these videos!
And thank you for sharing your thoughts!
I liked this video! Thank you!
.....and Amiga users were playing games in hundreds oi colours from a palette of 4096 since 1985.... with stereo sampled sound. :)
Most early Amiga games were 16 colours (and maybe use the copper to give more, but I'll get to that) but what makes it look better is the palette of 4096 colours. Most systems were locked to a colour set but not the Amiga, it was capable of changing colour palette whenever it wanted which gives the illusion of having more colours on screen. On top of that the sprites can have a completely different palette in addition to the screen depth. But even the earliest Amigas (A1000) were in fact capable of more with HAM mode going to the whole 4096 colours (on static screens) but even under normal screen modes up to 64 colours.
Copper could be used in a way that the Amiga was capable of changing colour palette on a per line bases (take a look at many Amiga games and the background has colour gradients that have colours that far exceed the screen mode into the hundreds)
There are many games that defy the colour count on the Amiga but a recent one that is outstanding is a new one called Hamulet, it uses the HAM mode as a display. But when most games use HAM mode it's for static screens, but this game goes way beyond that with the full 4096 colour HAM mode and to quote the developer "Sprites are being recolored by the copper: 12 colors per scanline to be precise. This means a theoretical limit of 2880 colors could be displayed just for the sprites." and thats on up to 104 sprites on screen. Lets not forget that's on a system with 512K from 1985. Most systems from this era were easy to figure out what you could get out of them, but the Amiga just keeps showing that it was far more capable even today that was ever thought to be.
most of those games were reduced to 16 colours, being the Atari ST ports they were, cross dev and assets portability was often an economical necessity until the early 90s.
For action games, Amiga's original chipset couldn't sustain arbitrary 256 colors. Amiga Copper's race the beam palette changes has limitations.
@@daishi5571 Early NTSC A1000s didn't have 64-color EHB modes. Later PAL/NTSC A1000s have 64-color EHB modes.
@@semicuriosity257 Show me a fabled VGA {1987 the year that PC fanboys claim the Amiga was made worthless) 256 colour "action" games on the PC from 1987 till 1990. Go ahead I'll wait, this should be good! (1990 had Wing Commander, which when it was released on the a1200 looks and play great) I'll wait for the reply, but I can tell you right now they don't exist. And upon reply I'll tell you why.
Well I'd say another big jump came with 3D accelerator cards, what around 97ish when you didn't need a 2d card and a 3d card. I just miss the old days when a game came out for the most part it was finished, maybe just maybe you could send away for a disk with a patch. Now days gah.
Thanks for sharing
This really brings me back! So many great pc gaming memories, we had an old Acer 386 and just loved games like Flashback the quest for identity, kings quest, and so many other great titles!
Thanks for sharing!
I had an Intel 386sx with 2 Megabytes of ram. A Sound Blaster Pro audio card (Stereo audio and had a CDROM interface) and a ET4000 SuperVGA video card with 512k of memory that could do 256 colors on screen out of a palette of 262,144 colors all the way up to 1024 by 768 this was in July of 1991 that I had bought my first PC (Not my first computer).
That was magic back then. Even the Commodore Amiga wasn't as good back then with only 32-colors on screen out of 4096 color palette.
I was playing many games from 1990, like Prince of Persia and also Wing Commander and Kings Quest V, which all blew everything else out of the water back then.
EGA sucked because it could do 16 colors on screen at once with only a 64 color palette. Even my Atari could do that but have a depth of 128 or 256 colors and the Atari ST had 512 color palette.
So, EGA was behind both the Atari ST and Commodore Amiga (but could do higher resolutions), but VGA and SVGA went way beyond everything in the market.
That's right, but there were some really great EGA games, like Loom
Old good times...
nowadays everything became so realistic, I don't like, I'm still stuck on old games !
Agree!
Something about computer graphic artists trying to fit 256 color art looks so good. A balance of animated and realism. Maybe the Golden Era of pixel art.
Precisely. These were artists, though not recognised as such. Very important
I had an Amstrad PC1512 with 5¼ floppy drive that my father managed to get for himself mostly but, little did he know that it was a turning point for me. I'd witnessed Dragon32/64s, Commadores, Spectrum's and other systems by then, I did have an Amiga 500 and a CD32, but my heart lies with the dinosaur.....For the record...this PC had an 8....yes eight...MHz cpu. MS (Microsoft!) Dos 3.2! When you just rationalise that modern CPUs have upwards of 5000MHz+ (5GHz) clock rates is mental. Playing the first gen CGA 3-colour 3D games like Elite. on an actual CRT monitor using a 3 button joystick? When I was about 8 years old? then including all the games mentioned here thereafter?? Such nostalgia bombs going off here!
My realisation is that before higher resolutions and smaller pixels? was simply the use of more colour. Some of the masterful use of simple colours and pixel shading was formative and mind-blowing for my kid brain, and it seems so insanely rudimentary now. But is was supposedly bleeding edge to us then. Well.... at least to me anyway. I'm a full-time IT engineer now, self-taught, and still gaming. I have my dad to thank for buying that early PC and inadvertently seeding the rest of my career. Nice vid man...Love a good nostalgia bomb.
Thanks man. Like Orson Wells said: the enemy of art is the absence of constraints. Meaning that with all those technical constraints, developers from the past had to become more creative than modern ones to achieve masterpieces as they did in the 80s.
Our family could never afford a PC in the 1980s and '90s and instead we had a TI-99/4A and Atari 800XL (which could display way more colors than a pre-VGA PC although the resolution isn't as good). But years later I got to play MS-DOS classics through DOSBox and noticed how some games really jumped in graphics quality between sequels, like King's Quest IV and V. Then I found out about CGA, EGA, VGA, and SVGA. Anyways the first 256 color VGA games already appeared in 1989 with 688 Attack Sub, Budokan, Mean Streets, Star Trek V, Face-Off, The Tongue of the Fatman and a few others but you can tell they weren't fully confident on what VGA could do in 1989. Dream Zone in 1988 used VGA and in fact looks best in VGA, but it only displayed 17 colors and using a slightly different pallette from EGA palettes, and Rockford the Arcade Game from December 1987 managed to display 32 colors making it the first PC game to display more than 16 colors. For me the big turning point in VGA came with King's Quest V late in 1990. No game before had such incredible VGA graphics and it's easy to see why 1991 was the year VGA dominated. There were still a few EGA games that year (the Commander Keen series and Duke Nukem come to mind) and even CGA (the Monuments of Mars, Crosscountry Canada). In 1991 I was still playing the long outdated TI-99/4A and Atari 800XL so I knew nothing about PC graphics and sound.
Thanks for the extensive and very interesting feedback, Ben!
I could have done a better job demonstrating how poorly was VGA used prior to 1991 although it existed for several years already. And also to compare pretty EGA dithering with poor VGA. Didn't choose the right screens, will do best next time :)
You're absolutely right in your assessment. I didn't know there still were CGA games in 1991, very interesting. Good point with Budokan, indeed it's from 1989, and the VGA is very good in this one, as opposed to others from the same period. Need to check if this was really the case in 1989 or if they just made another release later with better VGA layout.
See you soon for another episode!
@@RetroDream Budokan was VGA right out of the box in 1989, unlike Loom and many of those other LucasArts games before 1991. Budokan was still backwards compatible with EGA and CGA but VGA wins in this case. Star Trek V has some very impressive VGA graphics but limited animation and the play scenes looking rather primitive (compared this to Star Trek 25th Anniversary from 1992 during the height of VGA). As for CGA in 1991, Crosscountry Canada was originally ported for the Apple II in 1986 and when it appeared on the PC in '91 they decided not to update the graphics and use CGA so it looks very outdated in '91. They probably figured many Canadian schools in 1991 likely had outdated PC machines still equipped only with CGA.
I hung on to my Amiga 500 all the way to1994 and got a 486 dx66 MHz which was alot faster but will always miss the Amiga.
i went from a monochrome green display (hercules iirc) directly to the vga 256 (although i also played the c64 back then). The first time i watched one of those vga 256 demos i dropped jaws, and stood transfixed even after it was over. yes it seemed magic. but we were kids, perhaps that's the reason. anyway, agree with you, '91 was a turning point, this is where dos really left amiga/ataris/consoles well back.
We were kids in a beautiful world :)
Thanks for sharing!
So you cited Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Loom as the "bad" examples of early VGA 256-color graphics. I believe the original releases of those games maxed out at 16-colors. It wasn't until later that they were re-released to have full 256 colors. In fact, Loom's 256-color version, at least on MS-DOS, was the CD version that had uncompressed Redbook audio for all its speech and music. Loom's CD version suffered from a condensed script due to the use of Redbook audio. It did have a 256-color version on the Japanese FM Towns MARTY system. Although the 256-color re-releases of these games retained the framework of the LucasArts SCUMM engine versions they used, I think the 256-color versions of those games do take full advantage of VGA's increased color depth.
Whatever the reason, the VGA version was not as good as it could, especially for Loom. For Indy it's less visible (there was a couple of very ugly screens, but the rest is better).
Thanks for the trip back to my first PC gaming experiences :)
Any time!
F-19, M1 Tank Platoon, Battle of Britain - Their finest hour, i played all of them and these 3 were great games!
Thanks for sharing!
First video I watch. Sir, impressive production value. Hard to believe you have under 2k subs!!
Thank you so much, sir!
Let's hope this figure will increase ;)
My first PC was a 286 with a VGA card (in 1992); I knew that this particular VGA had a "SVGA" mode of 800x600 and that my TWO MODE monitor (with two little LEDs, one showing "Mode 1" for 31.5 kHz, the other "Mode 2" for 35 kHz) would switch to Mode 2 if there was anything that supporting this non-standard resolution. After long search, by try and error, I finally found one game that did - the Populous - and the usually dormant Mode 2 LED came on! It felt like entering another dimension...even though the picture itself wasn't that much different from the regular 640x480 🙂
Interesting stuff Thanks for sharing!
Great video. I think that the VGA standard was a big reason for the success of the Pc's in gaming and in general. 1993 i bought my first Pc 386. Never had a 16bit machine before.
I can feel (and share) the love for Loom and Wing Commander 2…
VGA came out in 1987. But even VGA was not the first 256+ color graphics card for the PC. That first one came out either with the XT or the original 5150 (I can't recall which). It could do thousands of colors. It was just very expensive.
Thanks for sharing that interesting info
@@RetroDream The high color card that came out in the early 80s was for CAD. I don't think there was ever any games created for it.
The problem with early VGA gaming is that ISA is slow and doesn't have any gaming abilities built in like say the SNES. 256 colors requires 8bits per pixel. At 320x200 64000 pixels. At 8 bits per pixel that's 1,920,000 bytes per second at 30fps and double that double that for 60fps. That is well beyond was ISA is capable of. So you have to use trickery and limitations to reduce the data rate. Vesa Local Bus helped a lot, but it didn't come out until the 90s.
Agreed! Much love!
Amigas fans usually scream when I speak but in 1991, the pc had already dominated the game market and they were already obsolete
That was the turning point for sure.
Yes, I hung on to my Amiga until 1992, but then caved in and bought a 486 PC to play sim games
I miss the Amiga it was so far ahead of its time.
@Martincic2010 Unsure where you are from, but I can say for sure the UK and in most of Europe that's not true. The Amiga was still easily in the market right up to 1994 when Commodore when bankrupt. While I definitely saw an uptake in the PC market from 1992 it still hadn't taken the gaming/home market until Commodore went bankrupt.
@@daishi5571
In third world Brazil in 1991 no one used Amiga anymore, there is no way it could have been different in Europe
I'm in the pre-planning phase around making my own point and click adventure game and I loved Loom and the old Lucasarts games, Indie and Monkey Island of course included and I really can't decide which is better 16 colors or 256 colors. They are both so nostalgic. I like the idea of the added restriction of 16 colors and the creativity you have to have to represent certain things but 256 can really be beautiful.
The less colors it have, the more I'm interested ;)
Yes, there were a few scenes from Loom where I thought the 16 colour art had something that the 256 didn't (the stained glass window scene being a prime example).
VGA resolution 640x480. Graphics cards with 512kb+ available in 1990 can do 256+ colors at VGA resolution (ATI, Diamond, Sapphire, Trident, Tseng Labs, etc.). But all your VGA games are only 320x200 (25% of VGA pixels).
Yes games didn't exploit 640x480 at that time
Many systems were still CPU bound so 640 x 480 was not something that was practical. A good example of this is Syndicate (1993) while it did use VGA at 640x480 it also reduced its colour count to 16 so the system wasn't overwhelmed. Amiga version used 32 colours but at 320x200 and that was on a system from 1985.
I love that gaming era, so nostalgic and by the way, I shazammed that wonderful background music
Thank you, I appreciate! Glad you enjoyed
"The VGA 256 colors result looked no better, and sometimes much worse than the original EGA versions. (proceeds to show a bunch of comparison pics in which the VGA graphics looked decidedly superior to EGA)"
Meanwhile I had 16 000 000 colors on my Amiga 1200
Yea, at this time it still ruled ;)
16 million to choose from but we couldn't display that many at once. The normal maximum was 256 colours, and AGA had lower maximum screen resolutions than VGA (without the interlaced modes) and in any case, the A1200 didn't come out until 1992 and none of this classic era of early 1990s games were made to take advantage of AGA, and barely any meaningful attempts to use AGA came until after Commodore folded, so none from the big developers. Even the few bones we got tossed, such as Colonization in 1995, were for OCS/ECS, because they believed that the A500 was still the biggest market.
@@danyoutube7491Its the same now, console pesasnt holding pc gaming masterrace back.
I would never have thought the Amstrad PCs were available outside of the UK, let alone in America where I assumed there would be too much competition.
They were all over Europe, especially in France
The year that PC Gaming became a powerhouse
Compared to previous CGA and EGA standards, VGA is not based on a simple CRTC (cathode-ray tube controller, the Motorola 6845) and a bit of RAM, but with more colors.
VGA is a true programmable graphic processor that supports both the "chunky" (packed) and "planar" pixels modes, hardware fluid scrolling, raster operators, barrel shifter and software fonts.
Naturally, the software that uses this hardware is not compatible with EGA and CGA, so some time has passed before the biggest software houses released "VGA only" software that fully support these characteristics.
Thanks a lot for the super interesting precisions. Indeed it's a radical change in technology, a revolution rather than an evolution
I went from the Atari, to the NES, and then PC by the early 90's. I barely remember the switch from 16 to 256 colors. The big switch I remember came with windows 95 then 98, with CD drives and 3D acceleration, because that's when I stopped being able to play the current games, lol. I've still never owned an up to date gaming PC.
Luckily, Sim City will play on a potato. As do Atari/NES emulators. 🙂
Thanks for sharing
You are 100% correct that the Jump from 16 colors to 256 was a bigger leap than 256 to 64 million or whatever.
And I'd also add that the gap from CGA 4 to EGA 16 was even greater.
@@RetroDream Yeah, I think you're right again.
the 256 colors PC atomized suddenly the Amiga with : Coutndown, Wing commander & Crime wave. Access software itself did the gap for PC.
My goodness, I prefer EGA Loom over VGA too
I would not say it was a lack of skill that made early vga game look crap. Rather a lack of space.
The thing is that most ega game either used vector based grapics or runlength encoding. Some games used both, and some used a hybrid. This works good in 16 color, but thouse system work horibly in 256color.
This made vga game look worse at the time, but also ega games.
Now there was a number of games that suporet both ega and vga. This worked decently well with some types of grapics, but not at all with other..
Still , there was a other problem, 5.25" disc. Those contain only 360kB vs the 1440Kb of the 3.5" disk.
What happened around 1991 was that the market penetration for vga was that good that you could make a vga only game and sell. The compression in conjunktion with 1.44MB disc increase the capacity about 12 fault, of cause 256 collor using twice the space as 16 collor, there was still a 6 Times improvment, rendering compression just as god of an option as vector. This alowd 3 new things, dithering (well, higher quality) anta antialasing and pallet optimization.
That is the real reason vga grapics look that good. Remove those and it look just a bit better than ega.
For example compare larry 2 or 3, to larry 5.. and 5 to 6. While yes, larry 5 does look better than larry 3, the imrovment is not enrormus, then look at larry 6 (vga version). The diffrance is almost as big... still it uses the same grapics.
Many thanks for this great information. Very, very interesting and I wasn't aware of the subtlety about vector graphics. But my point was indeed to explain that ega conversions to vga were bad, as opposed to native vga creations. And you're right to link it with data space, the turn was also that of the 3.5 disk.
@@RetroDream Prior to using compression they used a ton of tricks that all had a impact on graphical quality,
So in a sense, you are right, the step from say 1988 EGA to 1991 VGA is enormous, but that is because there is a step missing between the two.
This is also why 256 color adventure game from say 1991 and 1992 look so good, but games like Doom from 1993 had a lower color fidelity, because of the real time nature, they could not use palet optimization.
There is hardly any EGA game that use pallet optimization, the only game i know of is Monkey Island. (that yes, its actually EGA, well the original is)
Many thanks again for these details!
And "thanks" to UA-cam for the delay in my answer: they really should improve their reply notification system :(
I would replace the word "space" to a rather more complicated "storage/memory/bandwidth/CPU usage.
EGA used Planar as a graphics mode when VGA is chunky/byte.
HD floppies allowed for more storage, Faster CPU's allowed to push more colours per pixel, more memory.....
Basically while VGA from 1887 may have been 256 colour capable the rest of the system wasn't ready (especially with end users)
Wasn't the 286 already pretty old in 1991? My family got our first computer when I was a kid in 1990 and it was a 386. I could just barely play Doom on it. If I shrunk the viewport down to the smallest, it ran pretty smooth, but you could barely tell what was going on XD
Edit: I remember so many of the games you mentioned, but played a lot of them a lot later. Wing Commander II was the first game my family purchased for our computer, but it barely ran, so I never really got to play it.
Thanks for sharing your experience!
We got our 286 in late 1989 and in 1991 it was indeed already old
286 & Vga, you were lucky $$$ you can't imagine. i knew several people in europe, we had at max : pc xt & EGA@@RetroDream
That's correct
The reason why the difference between 256 colors and 16k colors. Is that VGA could show 16k colors, just 255 at once. Most images, rarely if ever showed more than 255 colors. And 1991 games would pallet swap screen to screen.
Sure
Cool! Great job putting U6 in. What monitors?
Mainly IBM, PS/1 and PS/2
2:00 But these look great in VGA?
not the right samples yea
Many of the games you mentioned originated on the Amiga.. It was showing what good colours and sound in computers games were back in 1985.
Sure
I wouldn't say many. Lemmings is the only one I can think of. All the adventures and RPGs he mentioned certainly started on PC, and I think all the flight sims probably did as well. The Amiga was a better value home computer up to this point, the A500 being able to run many of the games mentioned in the video (albeit it with fewer colours) for a fraction of the price, but clearly the VGA versions of Monkey Island etc. were more beautiful than the Amiga's OCS/ECS versions. Unfortunately the developers of such classics were already skedaddling out of the Amiga market by the time the A1200 launched, so we never got to see AGA versions of the top adventures. By the time the CD32 got established in modest numbers, which could have helped tempt some big developers back to the Amiga due to CD being far less susceptible to piracy, Commodore had gone bust and there was no hope of the biggest names in the industry coming back.
When I got my first IBM PC 486 it came with Super VGA card and Monitor.
Is there a huge difference between VGA and Super VGA?
SVGA refers to a resolution of 800×600 as opposed to 640x480 of the VGA
SVGA is a mess. It is not 800x600 it goes far beyond that in a convoluted way.
What you have to understand is that VGA is in no way a standard (except to IBM who created it) everyone around that time was basically emulating VGA. Some companies used the term SVGA (Super VGA) but it was meaningless as the term had zero standard. However VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) used that term to codify a "standard" for companies to use as the blueprint to create compatible video cards. As long as a video card had the main features of SVGA according to VESA it was good however this was BS as many cards bent the rules creating new modes and promoting them when they were proprietary. It was a mess that most people today have no idea about.
TLDR SVGA is basically VGA but now a "Standard" so should work on any "SVGA" card.
far TLDR Cross your fingers it should work but depending on card it may work from anywhere between pathetic to good.
At 04:23 are these runes from another game or from a special collector edition of ultima vii? Mine didn't come with those.
Thanks for noticing. Actually it's my mistake, for some reason I took them from Ultima Underworld (where they belong) and put them with U7.
VGA doesn't get enough attention in retro computing circles as to how land mark a development it was (and throw in PS/2 mice and keyboard - I still prefer PS/2 mice as that bus standard is much more trivial to support than USB and PS/2 device driver support can be put into ROM to where even system bios level of code can sport PS/2 support)
I vividly remember seeing a PC with VGA in a store. As an Amiga fan, I knew the Amiga was dead that day.
@@8BitNaptime the interleaved graphics the Amiga had was okay for home computer use, but it wasn't taken as something serious for the work place, as even big corporations didn't want go give their employees eye strain problems intentionally. VGA was a smoother, easier on the eyes kind of graphic standard. And the multi-sync monitors started appearing and then the world marched onward and upward in higher resolution graphics.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, guys.
I'm using a PS/2 mouse at work
@@8BitNaptime Which was completely bogus :P The VGA-Standard alone didn't make the PC much better. Of course it finally mitigated for the PC's biggest flaw up to the time, but there where so many things still lacking for making it a good gaming machine. Like sound, sprites, a decent operating system and a nameworthy library of games. And regarding the slideshows you could see in the shops: these wheren't really better than Amiga HAM images.And even later in games like Monkey Island, I actually preferred the Amiga version, because it was much less pixelated than the square-pixel 31kHz VGA standard. Also the mouse did not lag behind, which made games like Lemmings completely unplayable on the PC.
The first games a PC could be actually better where vector based simulators, yes, because of the superior CPU performance. Bad the breakthrough was when ray casting came, as we all know.
Why is the image on your CRTs so squished. These games are meant to be displayed at 4:3, with nonsquare pixels
Yea this old video needs to be updated. I didn't have the right technique and setup two years ago.
Especially for me, revolution of computer games was in 1992, not 1991.
Agree, civilization from 1991.
But 1992 brought mk1, wolf 3d and dune2.
and Ultima Underworld
Should've gotten an Amiga instead.
Sure
I had an Amiga back those days it was great.
There were a lot of good reasons to get an Amiga instead of a PC, but if you had the money and only wanted the best graphics and not in any way cut down versions of adventure games and flight sims (or any genre which was best on PC, so not things like Sensible Soccer) from 1991 onward, then VGA PCs were the way to go. I say that as an Amiga owner and fan until the turn of the millenium.
If everyone had been smart, everyone would got an Amiga as of 1985.
LHX on my ninja 286 16Mhz with 0ws was a joy . I didn't have anything comparable on my Amiga.
1991 was the start grafix war then came 3dfx
5 years later yes for sure
Before VGA took off PC gaming was considered a joke next to most other home computers on the market such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST.
Absolutely, that's why this moment was a real turning point, as told here
@@RetroDream 1992 Amiga A1200 and A4000 had AGA which equivalent graphics colour mode.
@@daishi5571 According to Dataquest November 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast
Total low-end PC graphic chipset shipment history and forecast
1987 = 9.2. million, VGA 16.4% market share.
1988 = 11.1 million, VGA 34.2%.
1989 = 13.7 million, VGA 54.6%.
1990 = 14.3 million, VGA 66.4%.
1991 = 15.8 million, VGA 76.6%.
1992 = 16.4 million, VGA 84.2%.
1993 = 18.3 million, VGA 92.4%.
The estimate for the Amiga AGA install base is about 600,000 units. PC VGA crushed the Amiga AGA.
From France?
Absolument, monsieur :)
Absolument, monsieur :)
VGA came out in 1987, but wasn't good till 1991
Absolutely
According to Dataquest 1989, VGA crossed more than 50 percent market share in 1989 i.e. 56%.
Low-End PC Graphics Market Share by Standard Type
Estimated Worldwide History and Forecast
VGA
1987 = 16.4%
1988 = 34.2%
1989 = 54.6%
1990 = 66.4% est
1991 = 76.6% est
1992 = 84.2% est
1993 = 92.4% est
Major SVGA clones are faster than the original IBM VGA.
That's great info thank you. Yet the fact that VGA equiped PCs didn't necessarily mean that games instantly made good use of it. For that we needed to wait until 91
Funnily, the emblematic 320x200x256 graphic mode was called MCGA. Real "VGA" mode was the 640x400x16 (or sometimes 640x480x16) and was seldom used for games until the mid 90s, just like the true EGA in 640x350x16 that no one often used because it needed the top quality monitors and cards with enough VRAM. Hi-Res modes really became popular with the SVGA and 640x480x256 as most later/90s VGA cards were actually SVGA cards... typically one of the first Games I can remember I had that used casual hires VGA was Syndicate (1993)... also Pirates! Gold (1993). Mid90s... it coincides with the downfall of Atari and Commodore's specific machines and PC with SVGA cards becoming the de-facto standard. Late 80s/early 90s was the time of CGA-EGA-MCGA + AtariST/Amiga which was a difficulty for game's developers. They would often dumb down graphics so they could be used on most systems/specs form CGA/Amstrad CPC to Amiga or VGA, EGA and ST being the middle ground, 320x200 being the deFacto Standard resolution from 1987 to 1993...
Thank you so much for the excellent precisions. Indeed we take a shortcut calling VGA the early 90s games which were in fact MCGA. It's not totally accurate but people became used to it.
Actually I prefer EGA pallette. Many games like Loom and the Secret of Monkey Island still looks better in glorious EGA.
Civilization is VGA but arguably could be looking as good in EGA; just look at Railroad Tycoon...
There was this very short period of time in 89 and 90 where EGA type graphics was at its peak. It was not only on PC; take a look at Amiga at that time too. Although 32 color the style was much more similar to EGA than to VGA.
Absolutely true. But strangely, Civilization didn't look that good in EGA. It's like all efforts were systematically concentrated on one particular version, EGA or VGA depending on the game, and the other version was always not so good. There's few games that we can say were excellent in both EGA and VGA.