Meet the "Super CGA" Cards

[@deeiks12]

I was born and grew up in ex soviet union. And it's super funny how the timeline was all skewed for us. Here even in the early 90s computers with VGA were super rare. When the soviet union collapsed they began popping up. But then again Hercules graphics were super popular. Most all 'home brew' I remember ran either hercules monochrome mode or CGA colour mode. When I was used to hercules graphics CGA looked a bit like a step backwards because of the lower resolution.

[@marksmithcollins]

Yes, HGC.

[@SR-vz9nq]

HEY! I was born naked and backwards too!

[@belstar1128]

Food was also very rare back then.

[@geoffreykeane4072]

Your timeline probably wasn’t as skewed as you think. Here in Australia we really didn’t see the new video cards till well after those release dates, and even then they were so expensive it was ridiculous. In those days a new video card always meant a new monitor too! Hard to justify. I didn’t see an XT at work till at least 1986 and yes it was mono but not Hercules sadly. Back then bosses often wanted to get a computer but didn’t know why, it was usually to help with the typing of paperwork so early word processing. CGA was not fit for all day word processing work and I agree a step backwards, at least until VGA finally appeared.

[@the_kombinator]

I have a belarussian made COM+LPT card - complete with cyrillics - It's 2x the size of anything of its time. It DOES work, but if you insert it into an expansion card, you'll find that the serial port is not aligned properly, so if you have a screw in DB9, yeah, not gonna work unless you cut the connector up. Soviet precision!

[@curiousottman]

I worked in a computer store in high school in the 80s and I can tell you that ATI EGA Wonder card was the holy grail of video cards. We sold a lot of them mostly to high end users and businesses. Never could afford one myself at the time but even installing it for a customer was a thrill.

[@nickwallette6201]

ATI always did make good stuff. I had a VLB Graphics Pro Turbo in my DX2/66, and it was great. I used to get a real kick out of playing AVI files in full screen. I had a short diversion with a Matrox Mystique, and then a Voodoo 3 3500, but the I was on the Radeon train until ... well, until I can get an RTX card, I guess.

[@echoes89]

I have the card and it’s glorious indeed. You can configure it to appear as CGA for the software but output to a MDA monitor, which is really handy if you *really* need CGA support but don’t have any color monitor

[@seanv5306]

I bought their ATI VIVO card in 1999 when the Dreamcast first came out

[@alhuno1]

With the work Benedikt did on Planet X3, the game is really becoming a Swiss army knife of DOS games. Super hyped for Petscii Robots!

[@patrickcarrillo714]

I wonder if somebody will start doing The same thing that Benedikt did to the game but with sound options like supporting the Roland MT 32 or the ad lib gold or something like that

[@matsv201]

I wounder how it can run so fast with the 4 bit high res version. It looks like its faster than VGA.

[@tarstarkusz]

Now we need an ultra high res one for Professional Graphics Card. This was essentially a SVGA card available in 1981. A 10k Dollar option for cad work.

[@Okurka.]

It shouldn't be called PETSCII Robots anymore.

[@briangoldberg4439]

@@patrickcarrillo714 the problem with MT-32 is that it's very specific to compose for it, so it would take someone with a lot of specialized knowledge specifically in MT-32 to make it sound good. not saying i wouldn't love that, but idk if we would get something on the order of Mark Seibert or Michael Land

[@Keatosis_Quohotos]

I love how you use your own games as one a Rosetta stone to show off all the graphics modes. It's what makes this channel special.

[@Okurka.]

The host is also special.

[@kanedaku]

@Boco Corwin Also, Rosetta Stone in OP's post is probably not the best analogy.

[@juhojohansson1716]

@@kanedaku I disagree. I think the analogy works really well. After all, the Rosetta stone is not just about language, after all the same thing is written three times on it, and two of those are in egyptian, just on different writing systems... If you look beyond just language, you can understand that it is in a way the same content in different forms. Just as you could have the same graphic content on different devices. It does give us the possibility to compare the systems in a fair way. Just as the Rosetta stone gave linguists the opportunity to compare egyptian writing to greek. Comparison is the key here.

[@kanedaku]

@@juhojohansson1716 I understand. Hence why I said _probably not the best._ Your reasoning is very well presented, but the Rosetta Stone at its basic is a translational metaphor. A demonstrative metaphor wold have suited better. Solid explanation though.

[@Auxodium]

getting a bit tiresome though. I get his hustle, but I mean when it is mentioned every 30-60 seconds, we get it.

[@bookedsam]

In the next couple decades you will become the 64 bit guy!

[@joebrewer4529]

He should do a custom version of when I’m 64!

[@UnderEu]

He needs to upgrade to 16-bit and 32-bit processes, before 🙃

[@javvyjavvy]

I remember my dad making the jump from Cga to Ega. He bought the card and the monitor. He hid it from my Mother. He thought his cover was blown when she came downstairs one day to check on us. She had no idea what she was looking at it made us both laugh after. Still remember making the jump from Cga to Ega then to Vga and higher. Kids today dont appreciate all of this. They have no idea. Blast from the past seeing the title screens to any early Ultima game as well. Those boxes came with the most beautiful maps and books. I miss that in gaming these days. Really enjoyed your video.

[@LanceThumping]

The differences may be smaller today (at least for now) but kids today have plenty of an idea imo. The jump to HD, the jump to 4K, the jump to HDR that we are still going through (not all games support it still). It's not quite the same but we'll be going through this until we are basically directly injecting visual information into our brains at the full speed they can tolerate.

[@danaeckel5523]

I'll miss upgrading video cards and playing games all over again to see what I missed out on, or adding sound card to play my games again to hear what I missed out on.. Now it is, ohh look, I have more FPS 😐 Even RTX everybody goes nuts over today, I compare it to non RTX and go meh.

[@nopenottalib4366]

I actually had an ATI EGA Wonder card when I was a boy. For me, at the time, it was a HUGE step up because prior to the EGA Wonder card, all I had ever had were monochrome CGA monitors & adapters. It was SO exciting for me at the time to be able to experience all the games and software I used at the time in full color. Microsoft Flight Simulator 4, Sharkey's 3D Pool, XTree Gold, etc., and so on ...

[@BrainSlugs83]

Same! Golden Axe, Commander Keen, and a few others were just night and day with that graphics card! (vs the CGA card I had previously).

[@KenjiUmino]

The EGA Wonder can do CGA and EGA on an MDA monitor, right ? Looks like this is the card I need to get for my IBM 5170 if I want to use the 5151 monitor that came with the computer but still have CGA and EGA support in hardware without resorting to flaky CGA emulator software. Right now, I have shelved the monitor, using the 5170 with a plain old VGA card instead of the Hercules that it also came with - for the sake of convenience (only one monitor on the desk that I connect all my old computers to)

[@nopenottalib4366]

@@KenjiUmino I might be wrong, but I don't think an MDA monitor can display color. That said, with the EGA Wonder card you CAN use a standard CGA RGB monitor and get full EGA colors and resolution on it. That was what I had back in the day. EGA Wonder card + color CGA RGB monitor.

[@TheSulross]

the world was a better place when companies like ATI were flourishing - a golden era in more than just computing

[@schifoso]

I couldn't afford a color monitor and bought the ATI CGA (or maybe EGA) wonder card to use on my monochrome monitor. It w other really well by using shading for different colors. Played lots of Mean 18 golf on that setup...

[@retrotv1tech]

Interestingly enough, I just bought a copy of Planet X3 to use with my Tandy 1000 TL/2 which has the high res Tandy Graphics mode. I was absolutely blown away by how good it looks using the VGA file. If I had seen this as a kid when we had this machine, I would have been amazed! Great work on this video, and hopefully, Petscii Robots will eventually support the high res Tandy Graphics.

[@vjcodec]

My guy! 8bit guy episodes feels like making a warm cup of tea after a busy day and stretching out on the couch! :) ❤

[@GrandeCapoCannibale]

I owned an M24 for a while, it was an amazing computer. Unfortunately I was so stupid to throw it away but somewhere I still have the keyboard!

[@ChristopherMcCullough]

Every new upload makes me happy.

[@alexvar10]

Great video! It's worth mentioning that IBM had also released the CGA-compatible PGA card in 1984 for the CAD market, would love to see one of those in a future video!

[@bobblum5973]

At work my department bought an IBM PC/AT, which included a PGA (Professional Graphics Adapter) card and monitor. Thousands of dollars sunk into that card and monitor, and almost nothing supported it! I ended up upgrading it with a 128K RAM card to get to 640K, then a 2-Meg Intel RAM card, a 30 MB full-height HD _and_ kept the full-height 20 MB HD. We had a Digital Equipment Corp. 8-bit DEPCA Ethernet controller and DECnet-DOS in it, too, and Oracle 5.1 for DOS. I hung onto that for years after no one else wanted it, periodically the monitor would die and support would need to scrounge one up somehow. Finally one of the tech support guys asked if he could just please replace the PGA card & monitor with a VGA one with better specs. I said "Sure!", and I could see the relief on his face. 😁

[@HudsonGTV]

I was just about to mention this. The monitor intended for use with this was the IBM 5175, which aesthetically looks like an IBM 5154 EGA monitor. When VGA came around, it was common to mod these IBM 5175 PGA monitors to VGA.

[@Australian_Made]

Ahhh yes, PGA mode support, and PGA monitors. I read about it close to that time (1987) !!! I never ever got to see it, nor knew of ANYBODY who had seen it either.

[@BradHouser]

I had the original Plantronics Color Plus in my first PC, which I bought bare bones at Bussinessland (without cards or drives). The only software that took advantage of the additional memory that was even close to mainstream was Lotus Symphony. It supported the 4 color mode at 640 x 200 . BTW the original bootable Flight Simulator (the "acid test" of PC Compatibility) also supported a 16 color composite mode. My Zenith monitor had composite and CGA inputs, so it was an easy switch. Planet X3 looks great!

[@pedroTFP]

So good to see some Olivetti on the channel! Please give us some more of it! 😊

[@AshtonCoolman]

I grew up with a Turbo XT my dad got in 1987 that had an EGA Wonder. Some of my first computing memories was going through the EGA Wonder manual when I was 6 or 7 and changing the jumpers. I remember being wowed when I put it in non-interlaced mode, but simultaneously learned that it came with a performance hit. I’ve been playing with and benching video cards since.

[@VicTheVicar]

I got the orignal 5.25" disks of DrHalo at my parents. I'll back them up during Christmas and upload them. Also, I didn't know that the ATI Wonder 800 would work on CGA monitors. I got one of those cards in my Commodore PC-10

[@roboticgolem]

I'd bet your disk does the same. The missing filename (iirc) is too long. I'd like to see it work tho!

[@Tahngarthor]

@@roboticgolem I just noticed this on a rewatch lol the file name listed is 9 characters long. Could it be a typo/error in the program?

[@zsteinkamp]

Another CGA-compatible card from the era (1985) was the Wyse WY-700. What made it unique was that it was sold as a card + monitor combo. The monitor was a 15" paper white display, and could display 1280x800 in its highest resolution mode. When I was a kid, my dad worked for Wyse and brought one of these home one day. Heaven!

[@marcusdamberger]

I assume this was aimed at desktop publishing etc? I bet newspapers, publishing houses used this card monitor combo from Wyse. Businesses that could afford such a combo. Amazing to think 1280x800 was available then and how disappointing it must have been to have to use a CGA computer at work or school after looking at that monitor.

[@zsteinkamp]

@@marcusdamberger Yes indeed. He also brought home a copy of AutoCAD 2.18, which fit on a single 360K floppy. It was an absolutely killer combination on that beautiful display. AutoCAD supported a LISP-based macro language, which seemed so much more powerful than the BASIC I had learned to program in.

[@Etcher]

Whoa, 1280x800 in 1985 - your pops brought you back the most cutting edge visual display tech available at the time it sounds like! Right on to the tech Dads of that era :) (edited for typos)

[@zsteinkamp]

@@Etcher It really felt like the future. He knows that he had a big hand in my current career, which I'm eternally thankful for.

[@eekee6034]

Wyse! :) I owned one Wyse back in the CRT era. Not a paperwhite, it had beautiful color depth and was arguably too sharp for its era! Unfortunately, it was also flawed. Switching it off made scanning pattern collapse in such a way that it burned a mark into its phosphor much sooner than other monitors.

[@AlanCanon2222]

I was played out on video games on the C64 by the time our PC XT came along (Zenith / Heathkit Z-100), but I was into graphing fractals (the Mandelbrot set). My first PC had an amber monitor, so I used three shades of amber (white) plus black in my fractal program (Turbo Pascal 1.0, by the way). When I got access my first (ordinary) CGA card, it was a revelation, even just having four colors in 320x240 mode. My piece de resistance was writing an Epson LX-80 dot matrix print routine from Pascal so I could print my fractals: they looked great, but the paper came out practically soaked with ink. (Dad went into his wood shop and made a hand cranked printer ribbon re-inker from scratch: he liked using the printer too.)

[@bwc1976]

Turbo Pascal was the bomb! My school used 3.0 at the beginning of the year, but switched to 6.0 soon after. Either one was amazing in its simplicity and compactness compared to modern programming languages where there are so many libraries to learn in order to do anything useful.

[@AlanCanon2222]

@@bwc1976 Yeah, Turbo Pascal 1 on the PC XT was blisteringly fast. All my Mandelbrot stuff was floating point, so I was really stressing the processor as well. Waiting all night for it to paint the screen, etc.

[@mal2ksc]

Color dot matrix printers existed at the time too. They used special ribbons about an inch tall that had CMYK bands and would move the whole ribbon up and down to put the right color between the print head and the paper. Machines to re-ink those ribbons also existed, but it wasn't possible to maintain the separation between color bands perfectly, so they could only be re-inked a few times.

[@MrWolfTickets]

Ha! I had that Epson printer hooked to my IBM 5155. That's so awesome you guys re charged the ink cartridge!

[@sock_master]

The "136" color mode of the QuadColor card is most likely a visual trick rather than a real mode. The giveaway is the number 136, which happens to be the number of visually unique color combinations you get when you mix/dither/alternate two 16 color pixels. (16x16/2) + (16/2) = 136

[@ShieTar_]

Or (16x15/2) + 16. Same result, it just shows a little more clearly that the original 16 colors remain there, and then 16 colors mixed with 15 other colors are added.

[@n2locarz1]

@@ShieTar_ Strange, I discovered that 100+36 produced the same results. I went even further into my research and was dumbfounded with all the solutions.

[@2eAsyf0rm3]

I wouldn’t be surprised if the 136 color mode is based on a frame rate control method, which would be used for displaying 24-bit color on an 18-bit monitor. Either that or 136 might be a typo with a 3 accidentally inserted between the 16.

[@richardkelsch3640]

@@2eAsyf0rm3 I was thinking instead of dithering colors, it was literally palette switching them between frames to give a perceived set of 136 colors. Circuit wise, that would be easy to trigger per vertical blank, and would be effective on a CGA monitor. There are PC demos for CGA demonstrating this (although with CGA you would typically have to do full frame flipping without the hack).

[@masterhoshi]

Was going to suggest the same as it sounded like an interlace mode to me. In fact I wrote one in 68000 asm long ago for the Atari ST(e)

[@Rich-ll8ce]

Looking at the timeline of the PC graphics just shows how great (and advanced) the Amiga was back in 1985!

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Didn’t the Atari ST have 4096 colors in total before that ? Also RGB SCART is from 1980? No idea what IBM was thinking with digital video signal. Almost like HDMI .

[@Rich-ll8ce]

The Atari ST had a palette of 512 with max 16 on screen at any one time. The later STE had a palette of 4096.. The Amiga had "HAM" (hold and modify) mode that could display a still image of 4096 colours on screen at once.

[@kyle8952]

@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt No, it didn't.

[@kyle8952]

@@Rich-ll8ce Rumor in magazines before STE came out was they were going to give it 256 colours onscreen. No such luck. Weirdly years later a prototype STE with 286 on motherboard showed up...

[@nickwallette6201]

Advanced, but a dead end. Everything with specialized co-processors eventually was. The only way to progress past the initial hardware was to throw away all the software and re-write it for new hardware. The home PC industry had done that enough times already, and that’s a big part of why the IBM PC was successful. The industry wanted stability. Celebrate the Amiga for what it was, but don’t make the mistake of lamenting what it could’ve been. It _was_ all it could be.

[@marlborosilver]

Something tells me Pescii Robots will surpass Doom in the amount of machines that will be displayed on. Guess the next 8bit guy episode will show pescii robots in a Texas instrument calculator.

[@caodesignworks2407]

I just got a USB cable with a screen on it and the first thing I thought was "how can we get doom on it." Granted, it's more of a segmented display of sorts (shows how many watts a device is drawing, mostly useless, but also good to see if you're getting a proper charge at a quick glance) AliExpress did good on that one

[@djmips]

Uh, it's got a long way to go to catch up there. New Doom ports continue to come out every year and I'm pretty sure Petscii Robots is not going to get ported to an ATM

[@eDoc2020]

@@djmips Uh, ATMs usually run common OS like Windows. Thus if it runs on Windows it will run on an ATM.

[@TheLivingCatastrophe]

​@@eDoc2020don't atms run OS/2?

[@eDoc2020]

@@TheLivingCatastrophe I'm sure old ones did and maybe some out there still do but some are definitely Windows. Still my point was ATMs have common OSes. OS/2 is relatively common.

[@phillupson8561]

Love the size of those old cars, we can see where nvidia got their inspiration from.

[@eekee6034]

That's just what we called a full-length card. :)

[@AlanCanon2222]

5:00 the CGA snow had me reaching for the VGA connector that connects my monitor to my desktop PC.... you got me! :)

[@arjanvanraaij8440]

We had some olivetti pc's in highschool. Next to Ibm PS/2. In the day olivetti was the IBM of Italy.

[@rogiermaas]

I can’t believe I’ve had most of the cards and computers featured in this video! My mother, who was also a geek, eventually had a Redpoint XT running at 8MHz (turbo mode). I had a Sony HitBit MSX2 which had two joystick ports. It turned out that those two joystick ports were actually RS-232 ports and with help of a device driver called “MSX Connect”, I could use my moms 40MB harddrive to store my games on. That was my starting point in networking. My dad had a Tandy Model III which we could also hook up to my MSX with a modem (locally). Then we could use our 27MC radio to act a a packet radio for people who wanted to download software. I also had a BBS using FrontDoor to be able to use as a mailing system (“Press Esc twice to access the BBS” 😅. A modem in my MSX ran 1200/75 baud for people to dial in and leave messages or download software. Great times!

[@Paolo3480]

For your info, Olivetti also developed an optional card to extend the colors in high resolution. So Olivetti M24 (and AT&T PC6300) could have 640 x 400 in 16 colors, plus other nice features such as hardware scrolling, a look up table for the colors, possibility to mix a text mode plus the graphics mode in the same page, hardware dithering and hardware blinking. It could also allow to have one monochrome and one color monitor or two color monitors connected together. For example on one monitor it was possible to see a text mode and on the other a graphics mode. AT&T called it Display Enhancement Board (DEB), while Olivetti called it EGC2413 or GO329.

[@Paolo3480]

@The8bitguy1. Don't have telegram, sorry. It's an application made by a russian. I don't install russian or chinese applications on my smartphone.

[@exidy-yt]

@@Paolo3480 it's just bot-spam not actually from the 8-bit guy. Just report it unless someone (like me) does it first.

[@Paolo3480]

@@exidy-yt Thank you. Spotting the fakes on the social networks is becoming every day more difficult.

[@exidy-yt]

@@Paolo3480 No problem, brother. This particular spambot is like a plague on so many of my favourite channels I take the time to go through and report every post I see now. Dunno if the YT team loves me or hates me by now. 😅

[@amogus7]

...even though he literally escaped russia because he got fired from VK whatever just don't reply to spambots

[@hernancoronel]

I got an original copy of Dr Halo with a 3 button mouse, serial port (DB9) I bought for my PC back in 1990 probably maybe a little bit earlier. Unfortunately I didn’t keep a copy of it BUT it maybe useful for trying to get a copy of it from a similar bundle. Thanks for the video!

[@tvtoms]

Same here. I recently tossed out the mouse I think, but probably have whatever disk it came with.

[@f3liscatus]

Oh man, I had the same bundle (probably), I will have to search through my old floppies tomorrow... I hope I cam find it and more importantly read it after all those years!

[@tvtoms]

@@f3liscatus I found my disks, box, and manual but I haven't booted my XT machine in at least 30 years, haha.

[@f3liscatus]

OK, I found the disks... They were readable... But it's Version 3.0 Plus, much too new. There are only generic CGA drivers available in that version. Sorry. 😞

[@dionelr]

I had a computer class in middle school where they were able to get Tandy machines. Normally, classes like that would be using Apple 2s or Mac LCs. Still have good memories learning about DOS commands and business software.

[@CraigRodmellMusic]

As usual, thanks for making and posting. David, I always look forward to your interesting, enjoyable content coming out, and once again, this did not disappoint!

[@elbee2324]

I remember going from standard CGA to VGA back in the day. Such a massive jump. We always admired the potential of EGA but did not see it during the era, it was always too expensive and hard to find. VGA looks chunky by modern 4K standards, but it sure was amazing compared to what CGA could do.

[@freeculture]

I did cga to ega (using the same rgb monitor) and then vga with its own monitor, it was the 90ies already so all existed but things were expensive. I also moved from xt clone into 286, 386. 486, etc. And added a sound blaster early 90ies too, when i still had ega+286. Remember getting blown away by the likes of Budokan which was in fact just MCGA (which VGA also supports).

[@datacipher]

Yes I went from apple 2 and Atari to ega 286z. Was generally disappointed by the lack of support and the lack of developers tweaking the ega palette for best results!

[@teekay_1]

Nice roundup! I had forgotten a lot about these modes, and around 1985, I switched to the Amiga.

[@ecospider5]

One of my friends was an architect. He purchased one of the very early 24” monitors (maybe it was only 20”, but it was huge for the day) I knew it was very high tech for the day. But I didn’t think to have him give me that and the computer when he retired it. Another friend purchased 16Mb for his computer at $1800. I teased him for years about that. But he actually needed it for early auto cad.

[@MrWolfTickets]

Was it the Radius 2 page display? I think that was a 20 inch grayscale monitor.

[@ecospider5]

@MrWolfTickets No it was one of the first highres color monitors. It was so sharp compared to a tv.

[@QUUSUU]

In the late 80's, several Korean PC makers (e.g.. HYUNDAI, DAEWOO) used ATI-compatible CGA cards with 64KB of memory that modified the BIOS to output 2-byte Korean characters from CGA. The Korean CGA cards can be used by switching Hercules using dip switch or hot key, so if you are interested in it, I think it would be good to look for them.(However, a CGA/MDA compatible monitor is required.) They display 16 colours at 640x200 resolution. However, Korea at that time was a poor developing country unlike Korea today, so in order to use it as a color monitor, we had to pay an average of one month's salary in a colour monitor. For this reason, colour monitors for CGA were impossible to find in Korea.

[@marcusdamberger]

It's interesting to think of Korea as a developing country in the 80's to what it is today, and to have grown up in that era and experience the change would be interesting. Now they make high end electronics and EV cars that can be bought around the world.

[@SamuelLing]

didnt know hyundai made computers!!

[@kyle8952]

@TheMrDudiness Everything I have ever seen and read tells me that Samsung and Hyundai basically control South Korea like the Mafia, and have done since the dictatorship period.

[@andrewahern3730]

@TheMrDudiness tons of corruption, too. Look at Samsung. Some stock index issuers consider South Korea an emerging market, still. Most likely because of the corruption and biased business environment.

[@QUUSUU]

@TheMrDudiness Nicknames don't lie. :)

[@BerryTheBnnuy]

The way the motherboard bent when you inserted the card... I nearly had a heart attack...

[@namor18]

i have the amstad pc1512 still at my parents house, my first ibm pc compatible when i grew up and i loved playing games on it

[@IainShepherd1]

Me too. They were the first computer I really loved. For a cheap mass produced clone they really were good. 99.9% IBM compatible with extras like this 640x200x16 mode which you wouldn't expect for the price.

[@adamsfusion]

There was one last CGA improvement: MCGA. It was only shipped on the IBM PS/2 models 25 and 30 on the motherboard. It didn't work with CGA monitors, only analog video monitors (what we consider VGA today). If you stuck to the super common 320x200 resolution, you could enjoy the same quality as VGA would with much of the same configuration. Beyond that, it was an odd duck of a standard. For one, it came out the same year as VGA despite lacking most of VGAs benefits and requiring the same expensive monitor upgrade. It also had no EGA compatibility while VGA did (at least in terms of the official modes). Even as a superset of CGA, its CGA register compatibility was hit and miss. It was truly an odd and confusing standard, and it failed very quickly at the feet of VGA which isn't a shock.

[@jugostran]

That XT is in need of some restoration. Would love to see an episode on it.

[@Leofwine]

*Everybody* does.

[@Okurka.]

He doesn't have time to do it.

[@Schule04]

I wouldn't, if it was like the one he did with that ibm machine

[@Leofwine]

@@Schule04 oh come on, he will never be able to live it down.

[@dougdirac]

That is not actually an XT is it? Mine had one floppy drive and the other bay was the 10 MB hard drive. I thought the hard drive taking one of the bays was what defined the XT versus the PC.

[@gamerdre7376]

I remember cards like this when I built my first PC back in 1986. Also, those other systems you mentioned i had been in contact with but like the IBM. Back then the Amiga was a rave and people thought amiga would wipe the floor with IBM. Problem is people mainly saw it as a toy.

[@paolomessina7686]

I had two Olivetti M24 when I was a kid, the first one with 2 floppy disk drives and the second one with a stunning 20MB hard disk drive a couple of years later. In those days pretty much every school had M24s in their computer classrooms here in Italy. And businesses too: my father used to input COBOL programs on M24 at work. I only ever had a monochrome monitor, but I could swear I could see the colors on it! 😅

[@chriswathen9612]

Glad the Amstrad 1512 got a mention, that was a hugely popular PC clone in the UK as it was the first one anywhere near affordable. The 640x200 16 colour mode was really impressive, just a shame there was almost no software support for it and 99% of the time you were stuck with standard CGA. Amstrad did bundle the computer with GEM Desktop which did have a driver for the special mode (and bundled GEM Paint to show it off too) but beyond that and a handful of games, that was it. Amstrad's eventual solution for the later PC1640 was just to provide onboard EGA instead. Interesting that you mention using EGA with a CGA monitor - that was literally Amstrad's solution; the 1640 could be ordered with an MDA, CGA or EGA monitor and you set the dip switches accordingly.

[@KnutBluetooth]

Locomotive Basic (a GEM program also bundled with it) could also use the 16 colors. There were other GEM programs. Macs in those days were still black and white in comparison.

[@NeillRobinson]

I always get so pumped when I see there's a new 8-bit Guy video for me to sit back and enjoy.. Can't watch this one for a little while yet but in about half an hour I'm gonna be hitting play and sitting back to relax!

[@brycesstuff]

Your videos are great man! Always fun and I get a sense of wonderment from my childhood, back when I was building custom rigs out of discarded 286, 386's. 486s had just come out. There was pretty much no access to information on the perhipherals, so I had to just learn by trying. Watching your vids puts me back in that place. Thank you 👍👍👌👌

[@RaNma_]

same game here :)

[@AiOinc1]

I think the joystick port on the video card is a reasonable addition. If you're going so far to get better colors, it's probably for games. Beautiful camera work from Jim Leonard there by the way

[@hicknopunk]

Yeah, saves you a slot that a joystick card would take up.

[@nickwallette6201]

If you can justify a parallel port, being an alternate output device, then a joystick port isn’t really a stretch either, I guess.

[@LuciRosseTV]

The Olivetti M24 was almost the "standard" IBM compatible here in Italy, present in almost ever school in the 80s, my father got one for his business in 1985, paid 5 Lire Millions (i think around 4000 dollars at the time), yes crazy expensive but built like a tank, 20 mb hard disk, 640kb ram, ecc I also remember a huge 136 column printer loud as a truck!

[@rhydermike]

Those Amstrad 1512 PCs were a fairly common sight in the UK in offices and at colleges. The machine was commonly supplied with the GEM graphical environment, and some of the GEM applications such as as GEM Paint supported the 16 colour mode.

[@ian_b]

Feels weird now (and makes me feel old) to remember lusting after better graphics and the sheer excitement of getting my first "True Color" graphics card (a Cirrus Logic GD5429) that could do 24 bit at 640x480 (or 16 bit, 800x600, or 8 bit 1024x768). Having a scanned picture look like a real photograph was simply amazing. It's all so ordinary now, but in the 80s every improvement was exciting.

[@yne2727]

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[@brendanhoffmann8402]

video cards were always such a prized upgrade for me. I remember getting one, I forget what it was on my old 386 DX33 and it meant I could play games so much better! That was my first graphics card. A few weeks ago I bought an RX 6700xt, now that the price has come back to earth. It's just as special this time around, a massive upgrade from my old gtx 1660 super.

[@TanerH]

We had a PC6300 in our house when I was growing up... the video output was REALLY good for the era, albeit the 640x400 mode was nonstandard enough to not really be used that much. It also had an 8086 processor, so it ran at 8MHz (vs the standard 4.77 for the 8088) - which often caused issues in some games (they ran too fast) so I had to run a TSR to slow things down ;) Perhaps my favorite thing about ours was that it ran Mr.BIOS for its BIOS, so it booted way faster than my friends' XTs ;) Sometimes I wish I had kept that old PC6300...

[@ClassicGameSessions]

Super VGA was the bomb but Super CGA is not a resolution term I hear as much of. These were exciting times for the evolution of graphics!

[@OMA2k]

I think "Super CGA" is just a term created for this video about advanced CGA cards, not an actual term that was used back in the day.

[@ClassicGameSessions]

@@OMA2k Good point, I think you're right!

[@danaeckel5523]

This video I can defiantly appreciate. I never realized so many extensions of the CGA standard existed. i believe you did forget about the IBM professional graphics adapter.

[@video99couk]

I had an Amstrad PC1640 without a monitor, I hooked it up Sony to a TV via a SCART cable and an added delay to the horizontal timing to centre it. Looked fantastic on GEM, more like EGA than CGA.

[@peachgrush]

Actually, Amstrad PC1640 uses an on-board EGA-compatible integrated graphics adapter. It can drive mono, color (200-line) and enhanced color (350-line) monitors. With 200-line displays you get low-res EGA 16-colour modes (320x200 and 640x200).

[@SeekingTheTriple]

3:46 biggest reveal in 8-bit guy history. Genuinely shocked me to see that glorious card sandwich!

[@tarstarkusz]

The reason you can run your game at full speed on composite mode is running at half the resolution (32 thousand pixels vs 64 thousand pixels). This is a huge relief for a computer with no hardware scrolling and a very slow bus.

[@einokeskitalo3217]

Fascinating video! And the Olivetti footage was downright gorgeous!

[@eigrp]

My first XT's video card was a Persyst B.O.B. board. That stood for "Best of Both worlds". As in, you could have color CGA but with text as sharp as Hercules monochrome. I don't think it had any graphics modes beyond standard CGA, however its text and fonts were crisp and hi-res, as advertised.

[@terbog]

Cool video. Was not aware that some of those CGA Cards had such secrets!

[@Shineyongs.]

I've been dealing with PCs since VGA, but I'm new to the various graphics card specifications that came out in the CGA days. Also thanks for the demo.

[@joeaverage3444]

I learned to code turbo pascal on an Olivetti M24 in high school. Somehow we had about a dozen of them in our computer room in the early 90s. We're talking 1992/93.

[@hernancoronel]

Hi David, thank you for the great video!

[@paolozago6123]

I remember using the M24 in high school during the computer science classes :O At the times it was already pretty old, but nice to see it here and be proud of what Olivetti brought to the table ;)

[@TheAlby87Project]

My first ever computer were I played games when I was 3 years old was my dad's Olivetti M24. We had the green and black monochrome display, but I will always love that PC. So many memories!

[@mikeking7470]

Tandy 2000? A real outlier but was a great machine for Lotus 1,2,3 and AutoCAD. It was a 16-bit machine in an 8-bit world (and one of the few that ran an 80186). Sharp graphics and sharp multicolor text. We used them in Radio Shack stores and sold a few for CAD. Also one of the first PC's with a mouse and Windows (beta).

[@bitwize]

Tandy 2000 video was compatible with NOTHING else out there. It's hard for Tandy 2000 enthusiasts today to even find a monitor because it basically has to be the Tandy VM-1 or CM-1. Some people report getting a very early model of NEC MultiSync working but that's it. Even the way video memory was mapped was weird on the 2000. Basically 96k of video RAM was mapped into 32k of address space and you had to select which bitplane you were addressing by poking some hardware registers on the card. Most PC video adapters had a planar (EGA, VGA) or chunky (CGA, VGA mode 13h) map of all the video RAM into PC address space. The Tandy 2000 was a fantastic machine and could do graphics at resolutions unheard of on other PC-class machines, and its CPU was faster than any of them until 1986 or so. Even the original Macintosh had fewer pixels onscreen. But alas, it was just too weird for an ecosystem that was increasingly PC dominated.

[@navegantes_del_magallanes]

I've lived thru all video cards and monitor resolutions starting with CGA color monitor in 1985, EGA in 1986, VGA in 1989, S-VGA in 1991. Had the cheap stuff but also the Cream of the cream Nec Multisync monitors. Spent quite some money on ATI video cards too, including all EGA, and all-in-wonder series. Had the best time and memories in building customs PC's from 1985~1999. Really enjoyed those times with Sound blaster, Wave blaster and AWE sound cards and voodoo SLI video cards. Great times when you need a 2D video card and 3D video card in SLI mode.

[@snakefriesia6808]

Amstrad 1512 and 1640 ... ah man ... i used those not just at school .. and they came with a really huuge manual for the included GEM on top of the DOS ..it was such a great help to work with the GEOS clone .. and it played a lot of good games.. The only Minus : The computer was powered by the Monitor .. and some monitors had bad whistling high-voltage transformers in the monitor...

[@OMA2k]

Computer powered by the monitor. Typical Amstrad 😊. I had the 8-bit Amstrad CPC 6128 and it was also powered by the monitor PSU.

[@snakefriesia6808]

@@OMA2k yeah i know right.. when i was an intern i had to cope with a high-pitched whistle coming from the monitor when my first workcomputer was replaced with a beefier one.. both amstrad

[@NeilRoy]

Great video. For decades I did not know that CGA could do all you mentioned. I think it was one of your past videos on CGA that blew me away on what it could do. In the 1980s I mainly used my C64 with great sound and graphics, then my various Amigas (A500, 2000HD and 1200). I didn't buy a PC until Commodore went bankrupt, then I grabbed VGA. I remember those Tandy systems though, had I bought anything in the '80s it would have been a Tandy. I did learn to program a little bit on an IBM PCjr and I loved it (didn't know about what was bad about it, don't know if you ever done a video on it). It was mainly a school computer, but it impressed me... probably due to BASICA. IBM's BASIC back then was SO NICE compared to other systems (the graphic mode commands etc... made it so easy to create). Anyhow... nostalgia overload here.

[@siskavard]

Our first family computer was a Commodore Colt with CGA graphics. I remember playing lots of games on it. Seeing that magenta/cyan combo is very nostalgic for me

[@turrican4d599]

What an awful way to play games. ;)

[@siskavard]

@@turrican4d599 If you tell yourself something is awful then you will only see awfulness. For me those colors were magical they still inspire me to this day.

[@charlesverrier4008]

The M24 was a lovely machine - I worked at an Olivetti reseller in the 80’s and installed a lot of them - mainly running WordStar or WordPerfect on greenscreen monitors. They came with a choice of keyboards (function keys on the left or along to top)

[@shootytheturtle]

The Olivetti was actually pretty impressive - nice clear text

[@crxtodd16]

Nice! Thanks for taking the time to put this together. Love the trip down memory lane.

[@Cassandra_Johnson]

Also of note is the built in card on the dynalogics Hyperion - it could do superscript and subscript text directly in text mode. Best (only?) seen in their In:Scribe software package.

[@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266]

I own 4 cards made by Dynalogic for an S100 bus connector from a guy who owned a Hyperion computer down the road from me

[@Cassandra_Johnson]

@@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266 wouldn't mind finding a ram expansion one day, but anything hyperion is hard to find.

[@weedmanwestvancouverbc9266]

@@Cassandra_Johnson one of the cards from dynalogic that I have is a ram expansion card on a S100 bus. Does the Hyperion support the S100 bus or not? PS I might want to pick your brains about the Hyperion as I'm on the verge of buying one but it doesn't show a display so something is wrong with it

[@TryAdaptLearn]

Good job explaining the vintage graphics hardware. Every year the new model with 4K+ resolution and gigabytes of vram may not seem like a lot until a trip down memory lane with 320x240 resolution and 32k memory was ground breaking at the time.

[@windsaw151]

I still think that the main reason why composite colour CGA never got much traction wasn't RGBI but that this trick only works in the NTSC world.

[@johndododoe1411]

That's a bummer. Is there no trick to do this on a PAL card? I mean, if that card supports all 16 colors in text mode, the question becomes if the trick operates entirely before the color modulation circuit or can work by using different color encoding on odd numbered scan lines.

[@Toonrick12]

@John DoDo Doe It's possible, but consider that at the time, the PAL world was mostly Commodore, Sinclair, Acorn, etc; not IBM PC. Considering composite color was niche, doing it in PAL would be a niche of a niche. Not a good investment for any tech company at the time.

[@windsaw151]

@@Toonrick12 I checked several sources. The technology to get colours that way is called "composite artifact colors" and specific to NTSC. Maybe I missed something, are you sure that it is also possible on PAL?

[@Toonrick12]

@@windsaw151 My comment was more of a "Even if it was possible, it wouldn't of happened anyways because of the lack of user base of the IBM PC in PAL regions.

[@DeccaOnline]

Thanks for this nice trip back into those days, so many pictures you showed remained since then, shivers.

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

I only learned about CGA Composite mode *DECADES* after my PC clone with CGA was my primary system. The funny thing? The third party CGA monitor I had at the time had both TTL and composite inputs - *AFTER* retiring it as a computer monitor it became my video game computer, using composite to connect an NES. I wish I'd known about composite mode at the time, I would have connected both and switched between them for games! For some reason, I just never even thought that the RCA port on the back of my computer was for composite video!

[@AllGamingStarred]

Connect an NES? What is this sorcery?

[@freeculture]

That's the reason the older Sierra games looked so awful in RGB, was it green, red, brown, and background blue? iirc Space Quest and Larry's did that... Oh yeah the fact you could switch background to other than black is often forgotten, and yeah you have more colors to choose from. A few games used it for special effects too.

[@freeculture]

@@AllGamingStarred I did the exact thing with my Apple //c color monitor (also a composite) back in the day... In reality it was a Chinese Famicom clone with composite output, quite convenient.

[@TheRealLaughingGravy]

Boy, does this take me back. I worked in QA at a software publisher (Mindscape) in the 1980's, and my whole day seemed to be spent swapping video cards (and other cards) in and out of computers, flipping DIP switches, and making sure things worked right. Often, they didn't. As I recall, didn't CGA have several (I'm guessing four) four-color palettes, not just the magenta/cyan one? There was also a red/blue. I remember testing a hockey game that managed to mix these two palettes on the same screen, with the blue/red on the top half and the magenta/cyan on the bottom. The programmer was so proud of himself for figuring out how to do this.

[@stevethepocket]

Ah yes, the famous raster interrupt trick. Never heard of it being used on a PC before, but it doesn't surprise me that someone's pulled it off.

[@BillyNoMates1974]

to think what the Amiga had in 1985 compared to the PC

[@Loki-]

Man, this video is SO COOL! Love your stuff, David.

[@kuro68000]

The 136 colour mode might just be taking advantage of the fact that many "CGA" monitors are just 15KHz RGB monitors with a buffer to accept the CGA binary signals. Many of them had a button that bypassed it and turned them into normal RGB monitors. Another possibility is that it has some kind of hardware flickering that goes between two or three colours between each frame. That technique is used a lot on the C64 to get extra colours.

[@datagod]

Dude, you have the best intro of any show on youtube. Short and sweet, highly on topic.

[@fixitalex]

When I was young soviet computers had CGA compatible video cards. But most of monitors were monochrome Электроника МС6105. So most of well known games I was observing in grayscale. Alley Cat, Defender of the Crown, Monkey Island and so on. I really was dreaming how amazing those would be in colour... When I finally got colour МС6106 I realised how I was mistaken. It was one of greatest disappointment of youth.

[@CAHSR2020]

Excellent topic. I was confused that I remembered CGA monitors but never seeing those hideous cyan-magenta visuals. Turns out the computers I was using all supported CGA+ modes that exceeded four colors. While EGA looks unimpressive today it was considered a big improvement back then. When VGA came out I was so impressed I thought it would last forever. Today a VGA image is so tiny I can barely see it on a modern 4K laptop.

[@user-tb5ns7hc5i]

I remember how excited we were every time we saw video graphics resolution and colour palettes increased from mono to 4 to 16 to 256, etc. Same with the sound channels and then stereo. Lol. The Atari ST and Amiga certainly stood out at the time as significant leaps forward for both technologies.

[@jarekstorm6331]

The Tandy 1000 series of PC clones had excellent graphics and color support. The Tandy graphics option was almost always the superior option at the time.

[@SimplyDudeFace]

You over looked the even worse Green/Red mode for the 320 mode that IBM CGA support. :-)

[@jovetj]

I really enjoyed my PCjr. Very unique machine! It also had its own three-voice sound system, and the 4-color palette was switchable between the standard cyan-magenta-white and green-red-brown.

[@SomeNerdOutThere]

Oohh I had the Amstrad PC1512. Ran MS-DOS 3.2 on it with GEM Desktop. The best part was that I could use a special graphics mode with 64 shades of grey.

[@BrorAppelsin]

That Olivetti was very very proprietary in every fashion. I worked at the Helsinki School of economics in the late 80s and there was a lot of M24s around that were pretty much junk when it came to upgrading. Changed them out for HP as fast as we could.

[@cowesdave9503]

I only ever used one, had an insanley loud hard drive whine, like a jet engine. Did yours do that?

[@BrorAppelsin]

@@cowesdave9503 Yes they were noisy and heavy as ....

[@javierespinazopagan3172]

I have an Amstrad PC1512 stored in my room at my parents' apartment but I don't recall ever seeing a 16 colour high res game although I do remember having a choice of 2 CGA palettes (magenta and green) on most games and some even used both for different screens

[@TheGreenReaper]

My mum threw mine out! I guess I can't really blame her, but it would have been nice to have it - and the BBC Model B that ended up eaten by mice (and a smoothing capacitor popped, but that's almost expected).

[@zelmatrix731]

I grew up with CGA graphics cards in the 80's, but when using them with a composite mode the colors did make a noticeable difference. Thanks for the 8-bit flash back.

[@soteful9949]

0:16 that's what she said

[@superangrybrit]

Thank you for including composite mode. Good video as always!

[@gerhard_adler]

Are you planning to make a new game? Really enjoyed the earlier devlogs!

[@carpetshake]

Thank you for including the audio of the cable hitting the table at 7:22

[@segymun1720]

Yes more 8-Bit Guy content to fill my soul *Bless*

[@retro-game-garage]

Exactly

[@Castaa]

Love this video history. These type of videos are my favorite on your channel.

[@8bvg300]

Ooh, I had a pc1512. Great machine

[@chucku00]

The Olivetti M24/AT&T 6300 is also known under the name of Logabax Persona 1600. It was used in French high schools as a file server for the nanoréseau (nano network) connected to home computers Thomson TO7 and MO5 that were used by students in computer classrooms. It also has the particularity to use a hard-sector 5 1/4 floppy drive that required specific 10 punched holes floppy disk instead of one in standard soft sector floppy disks. The Olivetti highres CGA mode looks quite similar to the Atari ST highres mode, except Atari ST 72hz refresh rate. It also has a 512x256 mode compatible with earlier M20 model. The Amstrad PC1512 (and later 1640) was anything but obscure in Europe since its price made it a best seller in western Europe in the late 80's, allowing home users to buy a PC just like the Tandy 1000 did in the US. But PC compatibility issues seriously compromised its success anywhere else.

[@KnutBluetooth]

The Amstrad PC1512 is nowhere near an "obscure" computer. It was one of the best selling XT clones ever. About 25 games supported the enhanced color mode including Lemmings, F-15 Strike Eagle and Maupiti Island. But this mode was used for GEM Desktop, the Apple-like color graphical shell and for it's apps such as GEM paint and Locomotive Basic.

[@kaitlyn__L]

Calling it obscure is very American! Heh.

[@FaketheFunk78]

All of the Sierra SCI-titles could be made to support the PC1512 16 color mode; there was a driver for this mode in a few of their titles which would work with any SCI game.

[@MurrayDagostino]

It might’ve been obscure in the USA, in europe I feel it was very popular back in the day.

[@Fred_le_lorrain]

The Amstrad pc1512 was the first PC with 2 floppy disk and monitor under 500£ or 1300$ of 1986. The others sold their PC compatible 2000 or 3000$ at the same date. Amstrad is an UK trademark, so it was sold only in Europe I think.

[@alibro7512]

I worked as a computer engineer in the early 90's and most of the PC's I saw were Amstrads. The 1512 and 1640 were kinda plasticy and cheaply built but were amazingly reliable. They may have been rare in the US but in the UK they were everywhere.

[@menhirmike]

Future Episode: "We found a one-off prototype graphics card that does 19 colors in 584x188 pixels resolution. It never shipped in any machine, and the prototype is half-broken, with drivers that are barely working. We've added support for it to Planet X3."

[@HelloKittyFanMan]

Wow, that Olivetti mode is pretty nice in comparison! So are you saying that those photo-like images that you showed in that mode were drawn specifically with the Olivetti in mind, so that they would actually have the image data there to present, without having to rely on hoping that interpolation would get it right?

[@widicamdotnet]

Very likely these images were actual photos (or full-color artwork) converted down to something like a GIF that CShow can display - that program takes care of dithering the colors or grayscales to match what the selected display mode can do. I'm using the same program in Plantronics mode on my PC20.

[@kf4get]

hi 8-bit guy I am home with Covid for the second time. back in 2020 it about done me in. this time I am still home and watching your videos helps me to get through the days and nights alone locked down at home. Gob Bless

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

The Amstrad wasn't an obscure system in the UK. It was probably the most common PC clone over here, and iirc launched the whole market for clones.