The intrigue of SmartEGA and SuperEGA 

The NEC Multisync II I was aware of. The others are new to me. Thanks for mentioning those. All very rare anyway. I actually plan to get an RGB2HDMI adapter to try it out. It supports some EEGA modes, but I have no idea if it can be coaxed to support Genoa's modes. It's out of stock at the moment, but I'll try to pick one up if they get them again. I was not aware of the Plantronics driver for the Sierra SCI Gen 1 games. If you have a link to a source you could update the Wikipedia Plantronics ColorPlus article about that.

The original NEC Multisync I (model JC-1401P3A) from 1985 also supports all the same digital RGBI/RI-GI-BI modes and VGA / Analogue RGB modes as the II (horizontal frequencies between 15.5-35Hz, vertical 50-62Hz) excepting that it has a lower maximum scan rate, topping out at a resolution of 800x560@56Hz. I have one that I was lucky enough to have thrifted in the mid-90s that I still use for both my Commodore 128 and Amiga 1200.

@@JeremyLevi 560 lines at 56Hz, or was it 600 lines at 56Hz and 560 lines at 60Hz? I kinda figured that limitation was one of the reasons for the nasty-ass original SVGA mode (IE, 800x600 at 56Hz... there aren't really many extant 560-line standards, and 800x560 would be a weird aspect ... even though something like 720x540, an edgy 752x564, or pushing the envelope with 768x576 and reduced blanking would surely have been perfectly good alternatives if you wanted to keep 4:3 aspect ratio and not suffer too bad a flicker...?)

Yes indeed. Technically it was as long from CGA to EGA as it was from EGA to VGA, but EGA was very expensive when it came out because IBM were the only ones selling it. It took nearly two years for C&T to come up with a clone chipset and for it to appear in a raft of clone cards that were affordable, and by then there were already rumours of IBM working on a 256 colour adapter.

And yet a lot of seminal games and other software support that as the main / highest graphics mode, especially if colour was essential but absolute high resolution less so... Including some using 640x200, or 640x350 with custom palettes, and the acceleration features, not just actually being targeted at Tandy (thus PCjr) mode and lazily reusing the graphics assets... and that remained the case well after VGA came onto the market (and EGA would have been an increasingly budget option). So it does kind of seem that it had a bit more relevance than all that?

Well it was 3 years from CGA to EGA (1981 to 1984) and it was 3 years from EGA to VGA (1984 to 1987).. VGA in turn was only king of the for one year untill SVGA in 1988 and XVGA in 1989. Also worth saying that PCjr and tandy graphics came prior to EGA, and MCGA came prior to VGA. Due to PCjr having the same most popular grapics mode (320x200 RGBI) as EGA, and MCGA having the same most popular mode as VGA. (well for a while). True VGA is incredibly uncommon. By the time VGA chip was as cheap as it could be afforded on a normal home computer, SVGA was alreddy the norm

@@matsv201... yet, again, that's what has by far the most support (320x200 256-colour for games and 640x480 16-colour for productivity), with the slight upgrade of 640x480 256-colour having a brief flush of popularity in the mid 90s before Windows 95 and 3D accelerators (and the general rise in popularity of 3D titles) made high- or true-colour at whatever resolution your particular card and monitor could support at a reasonable speed the order of the day. I'm not sure what XVGA even is... SVGA isn't really a set standard, other than it being commonly taken as the aforementioned 256-colour mode (which is more properly an XGA thing) or 800x600 resolution (initially with 16 colours) which was never an official IBM thing even though technically it's about as high as you can go with the memory and bandwidth of the original VGA card, if you have a multisync monitor and can deal with the vertical refresh rate. As far as I was aware MCGA and VGA (and XGA?) all came out at the same time, as different options for the PS/2 range that IBM launched in '87? The first two being different built-in options for the cheapest and the more mainstream mid-level machines, and the latter being an add-in MCA card. Perhaps there was supposed to be the option of an MCA-bus EGA-grade upgrade for the MCGA but it was abandoned, or the idea was meant to be that your upgrade path was VGA, which would give you that capability anyway (don't know if there was an MCA VGA card made, but they certainly never offered MCGA as anything other than integrated to a motherboard). Like they weren't separated in time by any meaningful degree, they were supposed to be the entry level, mainstream and advanced graphics options for that model range, with proper backwards compatibility to software made for the lower ones with the higher models. As in VGA encompasses the MCGA modes perfectly (but with the option of acceleration and more memory pages if you want to use that as well), as well as CGA/EGA/MDA (but not Herc or 400-line SuperCGA, or certain SuperEGA modes, as those were all someone else's standard...), and XGA actually acted as a passthru card where it only generated the high-rez interlace and the 256-colour VGA-rez modes, and let the onboard VGA handle all the other things... (though again it probably didn't emulate PGC in any way other than the colour depth). But in any case, I think we're talking at cross purposes. Listing off the release dates and the period where each standard was top dog isn't really telling the story. Each of them stayed "relevant" for a lot longer, and in terms of relevance and popularity, just being the best doesn't matter. You need to be attainable and therefore used by a lot of people and supported as a main option within the software they use. In which case you can argue VGA being relevant for a very, very long time vs anything else, both because of its popularity as a gaming mode for basically an entire decade, and as a default for operating systems for even longer than that. But by the same chalk, EGA was relevant to games for quite a while as titles still came with support for it into the 90s (possibly due to overlap with Tandy, and it being easy to enhance a little in VGA by changing the palette), and CGA to the end of the 80s (MCGA also creating a reason to hang onto that, maybe with the occasional custom palette again, where you didn't want to bother with 256 colour mode or it would have run like absolute crap)...

Yeah in 320x200 graphics mode it just has background colour, which is what is used to do the raster bar effect. In other modes there's either a border colour or foreground colour.

I guess it was down to IBM hanging on to digital TTL signalling, and wanting to still be able to use CGA and MDA monitors with the card therefore? The ST, like the Amiga and basically every other non-IBM 16-bit machine used analogue RGB output in its colour modes. So there was no hard limit on how many colours could come from the video port and be displayed on compatible monitors, same as with VGA. 64 isn't terrible, but it may have been a lot more useful if it had been usable in low rez on an EGA monitor. There could have been a way to signal the two colour modes with sync polarity or suchlike after all. And it worked reasonably well on, say, the Sega Master System. 512 or 4096 is better of course, but all of them are way better than a fixed 16 colour palette.

@@tahrey EGA's 16-colour palette wasn't actually fixed if you used a proper EGA card with an EGA monitor. The reason many developers stuck to the old CGA 16-colour palette and 200 lines was backwards-compatibility with CGA monitors.

@@ropersonline I know, I know. But I still think it would have probably got more use if the extended palette (as in, you can pick 16 out of the 64, not being locked to RGBI) was usable on actual EGA monitors and compatibles / multisyncs / etc. It'd have been possible to detect that vs plain CGA after all to avoid glitchy problems and user complaints (colour vs mono detect, and CGA vs EGA with high rez was a thing often enough). As I said, it may not have looked as good as the ST or Amiga, but it would have been on a similar level to the Master System or NES, and a little better than, say, the Amstrad CPC, as well as way better than the mode that was actually used. Like, you could have olive yellow, or orange, purple, pale skintone, actual primary colours, more choices than "light" and "dark" for each colour... etc... without having to dither... Sure you could just do it in high rez anyway, but that was only used fairly infrequently in games or art software (and other serious software rarely seemed to make any real use of it, including Windows, though that at least gave you dim yellow in place of brown ... often enough they were still text based, even, or just used the same CGA colour set). It looks nice, but it's a whole additional load of graphics that have to be made due to the higher resolution (which isn't simply doubled in each direction, but is 2x wider and 1.75x taller, so you can't cheat with pixel doubling) rather than just changing the colour depth / palette, it's more stuff to move around in each frame, more data that has to be stored on disk and in RAM, etc. Plus another factor is that not every EGA would be guaranteed to have enough memory to run a smoothly buffered hi-rez mode, or 16-colour hi-rez at all. If you had a 128k card it would only be single page (or 2-page 4-colour), and with a 64k you'd be stuck with 4-colour 1-page or monochrome 2-page only. The only mode you could depend on having full colour and double buffering is 320x200 (or you could run 640x200 and single buffer)... So why not give that the wider pallete? And indeed, 640x200, which would also let you compensate for the lack of bit depth by dithering horizontally and letting your poor dot pitch CRT physically blur the image into a wider range. But, oh well, the time's gone.

Ouch! I've heard stories of this sort of thing happening. That must have been incredibly frustrating!

@@PCRetroTech Indeed, very frustrating ...

Yikes, not so Smart then. Not entirely capable of detecting a multisync in place of a vanilla EGA!

I am not sure, but this sounds correct. The card supposedly supports Hercules modes if I recall correct. But don't quote me either, it's actually a while since I was deep in the research for this video.

I had a friend using an Hercule monitor on an EGA card, it worked except 2 lines or pixels were missing as the screen resolution was 720x348 and EGA was 640x350. But the image was perfectly fine but b&w (in fact orange and white).

​@@mmadmic I think EGA mono showed an actual 640x350 resolution. Like it seemed IBM could totally have made it completely Hercules compatible but they chose not to because that would be acknowledging a third party having got graphics working on their "text" monitor before they did... And it's not like hardly any software supported that mode instead of either Herc or colour EGA (or just EGA-on-CGA) except maybe Windows. (Text resolution for MDA, after all, is 350 lines, so no need to drop the last two; probably why EGA runs at that resolution in the first place, though they couldn't get it up to 720 wide in colour because of the higher 60Hz sync rate to avoid flicker with the shorter persistence RGB phosphors, which would in turn have required faster clocks and higher grade hardware, which they reserved for the higher rez but less colourful PC3270 instead ... not sure if textmode is 640 or 720 for mono EGA, but they definitely could have done 720x350 graphics on an MDA monitor if they'd wanted to, there was enough bandwidth and enough memory... and indeed four-greyscale graphics should have been possible but wasn't offered) ((and Hercules is only 720x348 in graphics mode because of some daft reason to do with it using the same kind of memory bank system as CGA, which means you can only use vertical resolutions that are a multiple of 4... the text mode is still 25 x 14 = 350 lines))

@willgilligan7605 Yeah, that was one of their usual selling points, being able to emulate the colour output of other standards "on any monitor" (within reason, e.g. you won't get RGB on a mono tube). Including a stab at EGA hi-rez using interlacing (ugh) and some kind of colour trickery on a regular CGA monitor. I'd be quite interested to know how they did it... just carefully driving the TTL lines at a half voltage that was enough to not fully turn on the transistors (possibly hedging on IBM / clone makers not making the monitor circuitry quite as digital as it pretended to be and still having some analogue reaction to input voltage in the midrange, or even actually being fully analogue and only really the card output being truly digital)? Some kind of PWM even though there doesn't seem to be fast enough clocks present to really do it in a satisfactory manner and there's no telling whether the monitor would actually be able to react fast enough? (I think I heard tell at one point that the regular "video" for MDA, and the (primary) RGB lines for CGA / EGA tended to actually be digital in their signal response, but the intensity (MDA/CGA) and secondary RGB (EGA) ones were actually analogue as it meant a few less transistors overall and the amount of variation that would be caused to the image by the signal level drifting or the response time being a little slow was rather less of an issue, so it could be that it's using analogue level output on the intensity / secondary colour lines to affect the brightness and/or colour of the output pixels... which probably works quite well for monochrome, if you adjust the brightness and contrast settings to emphasise the effect just right, but it must have taken quite a bit of cleverness in order to make it work even remotely well for EGA-on-CGA...)

Yeah it is amazing. I don't think I had seen it until a viewer pointed it out.

@@PCRetroTech in that case, let me share anothe title: Lost Eden from Virgin Interactive and Cryo. Worked wonderful on a 286 and default VGA. I played that on an Olivetti PCS 286 at 12 MHz with the Creative Labs 2 speed rom combi.

@@pc4ad Oh I remember that game. When I first saw it back in the day I found the opening sequence absolutely gobsmacking. I assume that was rendered on something really powerful and then played back as video, but even so it was breathtaking.

@Lassi Kinnunen 81 Yes I believe that it is mentioned in the video I linked. If I recall correctly Ron Gilbert figured out how to compress Mark Ferrari's dithering.

I played the whole game in glorious mode 1 EGA back in the day. I don't think the original version had VGA or speech; I think those were later additions in later re-releases. I'm not even sure if I already had my Sound Blaster when I first played LOOM, and I'm not sure the game supported it. There may have been Adlib support from the start, but I think I may have initially played it with PC speaker sound only, which would have compromised the experience much more than the limitation to EGA mode 1. Come to think of it, a lot of early VGA games could have used EGA without looking any worse, and a lot of late EGA games looked just about as good as early VGA games. Think Duke Nukem I and II (not 3D), Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, etc. But LOOM really calls for at least an Adlib card, I would say. Though they made great use of the PC speaker, audio is central to the game, and everything else being equal, Adlib is just so much better.

Yeah I've never seen a board in real life and I also remember it from Fractint and various image viewers. I always wondered what it was at the time, having never seen it advertised or sold with any PCs.

@@PCRetroTech Did you get to read my other comment here? Because that's now been censored twice, probably because I obliquely referred to a good technical reference resource from a country hated and suppressed by the powers-that-be.

@@ropersonline YT frequently erases my comments, especially on tech channels for unknown reasons.

@@ropersonline I replied to some of your comments below. I didn't see any technical reference.

​@@DavidWonn I suspect there's a scoring system, whereby if you start out with a penalty (maybe after getting flagged as politically undesirable), it's easier for you to cross some sort of threshold and have your comments deleted. You may also be on a worse algorithm, as I seem to be. Editing your own comments also seems to be a big factor in increasing the likelihood of silent deletion, as is URL inclusion, especially certain classes of URLs. (American-controlled Wikipedia URLs good, country-I-can't-mention-here URLs very bad.) If you're in Europe, RU-vid's deletion practices are probably flat out illegal, because they quietly remove your comments so even you can't see them in your own comment history. That's a huge GDPR violation, because your comments are your private data, and they can't just sneakily yank it. Not legally at least. And yet they're doing it. A lot.

I'm almost 100% sure the original IBM CGA card used DRAM. If you don't access sufficient locations in a given time it actually loses its contents.

Interesting. Thanks for the suggestion!

I'm working on solutions on all fronts for that. But it will take some time before you see the results in video. As for the PGA, they later clarify in their advertising that they only meant PGA resolution, not actual PGA emulation, which is pretty funny given their 100% compatible, no software emulation claims. I think the PGA did more than 256 colours anyway, which is certainly not possible with a VGA connector, at least not on any HiRes EGA monitor I know of.

​@@PCRetroTech PGA was upto 256 colours out of 4096 IIRC, depending on rez. Maybe like 256 at 640x400 but only 16 at 640x480 or such? @Dxceor2486 I coulda sworn I'd already asked this of you or someone else but RU-vid appears to be eating comments at the moment ... would you have any way of working out what the H+V sync rates are for the high rez modes using that setup? Particularly 752x410 which is a common oddity that popped up with SuperEGA (I have no real idea why, but possibly it was about as high as you could get with a multisync whilst maintaining EGA pixel aspect ratio, so hardcoded software didn't end up with distorted graphics?) and that doesn't seem to have any kind of definition as to its characteristics pretty much anywhere other than the few VGA boards that emulated it (...and their timing is basically regular 720x400 VGA with a smidge of overscan, or even a combo of SVGA 800 width/timing and VGA 480 height, so it's not relevant to SuperEGA). Likewise the 640x400, 640x480, 800x600, and a few other wacky modes in that realm aren't well documented, other than that it seems they're rarely if ever equal to those found with (S)VGA cards...

That sounds like it could work. As it happens I have an NEC Multisync VGA monitor so in theory the higher resolution modes might work too. There's no guarantee though. For a while every EGA card required a specialised monitor to go with it. If an RGBtoHDMI adapter doesn't work I might look into the DAC idea. The main problem is eliminating noise. Everything has to be fairly well shielded.

I'd expect so, you can connect 15kHz TTL to SCART with some resistors to drop the P2P voltage down from 5V to 0.7V, and a simple XOR (?) gate to combine the syncs. For CGA to VGA you could use an IBM-to-RGB converter circuit which is a fairly well known quantity (really it's a case of each of the primaries contributing about 0.47 volt, and the intensity bit 0.23 volt to all three channels, with a special case to reduce the green intensity by half for "brown") and maybe not even have to do anything to the sync at all. Or if it uses the EGA colour standard... each of the primary colour lines just needs to be reduced to 0.47 and each of the secondaries to 0.23 volt and that's that. IE you build a very simple 2-bit-per-channel DAC right into the cable... That's really all the Multisync does inside the case when displaying a CGA or EGA standard image (I think a genuine one even has a switch to cut out the IBM RGBI processing and turn brown back to dim yellow?), as does an actual EGA or CGA monitor, as the electron guns are themselves analogue devices. The use of TTL signalling is really just to make things simpler on the video card end (ditching the DAC is cheaper and uses less board space, and if you don't have a big palette it's kinda unnecessary), and also helps maintain signal quality at what were considered high frequencies at the time over not particularly good cables running between cards and monitors with circuitry that may not be the greatest at handling high frequency analogue signals other than for the fairly short run between monitor cable input and the actual tube. (heck, even the comparison machine of the ST used TTL for its highest rez mode, though that was double what EGA managed, and later the TT's and the Amiga's ECS extra high rez modes were respectively mono TTL and reduced to only 64 colour palettes for similar reasons, despite having VGA-grade analogue colour at regular resolutions)

He seems to have programmed the original versions of Planet X-whatever and PETSCII Robots himself, but the fancier graphics and the music are credited to third parties, as are a lot of the ports to machines other than the PC and Commodore 8-bits.

This wasn't my photo but one from Wikipedia. Thanks for reminding me. I forgot to add it to the credits.

@@PCRetroTech Ah. Pity. If you or anyone else knows anything about this Euro-GtO PC/XT mystery, I'd love to hear it. I do know that at least early US 5150 GtOs only said PC, not XT. I would really like to learn if later GtOs, or at least later European GtOs that shipped with 5150s also said XT, because this seems to be such an odd inconsistency. I know many people got it wrong back in the day and referred to PCs and PC clones as XTs/XT clones -- and here's evidence of IBM doing the same thing! So weird.

@@ropersonline They were referred to as XT by late 83 to simply incorporate a distinction to the PC-AT.

I don't know if those are composite outputs. On original EGA cards they were something else. It's a while since I made the video, so I don't recall if I found out differently in this case. The issue though is that composite output is a relatively poor quality signal usually. But at least technically, what you say is at least possible, as some manufacturers did make one of the outputs a composite out in the mid to late 80's.

@@PCRetroTech how diffrent is the synk? I remeber my old high-school running vga on ega monitors via a semi passive adapter. The opposite should be easier.

@@matsv201 I can imagine a digital to analogue passive adapter but not so much in the other direction. EGA had two sync methods so monitors could distinguish modes. I don't know much about VGA sync, but it's probably related.

@@PCRetroTech the amazing thing is that windows 3.1 looked pretty much the same on those ega monitors as in ega monitors.. the colors was pretty much exactly the same. But there was one drawbacks. The screens was pretty blury... and well running windows 3.1 on a 386SX is not optimal.

@@PCRetroTech if I understood it correctly they pulled the analog output with resistoes so it ended up on diffrent side of the trigger point of the digital adapter. This would make 3 of four diffrent scenario possible. The have to use a transistorer aray or something simular for the last.

That one I am not familiar with. There were a lot of these insta-standards that popped up around that time.

Probably "Hyper EGA" or "High-res EGA" or the like, or even just a company name (I think the parent company of one of the most commonly used super-EGA chipsets started with an H but I can't quite remember the rest?)... So, like, Hyper-Enhanced Graphics Adaptor ;)

@@tahrey mine was made by paradise. Some of them do have enhanced capabilities!

@@CoreyDeWalt yeah i don't think it's a name that as yup iijh

@@CoreyDeWalt aghhh phone phone ky Bboarrrd

I think it was possible to get different numbers of displayed lines on VGA through letterboxing or by using the overscan without damaging the monitor. But fundamentally these were just variations on a theme, the themes being those you listed. Going outside the bounds offered by those modes could indeed be problematic.

@@PCRetroTech VGA being backward compatible also supported 350p, but I don't know if original VGA used 350 lines directly or displayed letterboxed 400p. My ISA Cirrus Logic SVGA uses 400p in high-res EGA modes. These are of course all 'safe' modes that shouldn't damage VGA monitors. VGA was flexible enough to allow setting a large variety of modes. 600p was the most popular of undocumented modes, since it got support in popular software. Windows 3.1 SVGA 800x600 driver will fallback to VGA 800x600 56 Hz mode if there's no VESA modes. However the problem is, that despite VGA quickly become a widely adopted PC standard, nearly all cards were actually clones with some Super VGA abilities that could do 800x600 in 16 colors and 1024x768 in 4 colors even if they only had 256 KB of RAM. So it's really hard to even get original VGA hardware to test it's capabilities. My first PC had OAK 67 SVGA with a monitor that could do up to 1024x768 interlaced.

@@Leeki85 I have a large number of VGA cards, but I haven't actually spent time checking yet if any are really just VGA only. I once saw an auction of an original IBM VGA card, if there was such a thing. It certainly had IBM chips on it. It went for an absolute fortune and even though I knew that would happen I underestimated its value to collectors by a factor of about 2 or 3. I have a few OAK cards, but I'm not familiar with the OAK 67 SVGA. I remember my first VGA was a TsengLabs SVGA. I can only imagine that was an ET4000AX as it was in a 286, but I really don't know that for sure as I don't remember the model number. It's also possible we were actually supplied something cheaper and told it was a TsengLabs. We wouldn't have known the difference at the time. We'd certainly never seen one before.

@@PCRetroTech Yep, IBM made an 8-bit VGA-only card. Officially called the "PS/2 Display Adapter", since the idea was to bring PS/2 graphics to other PCs (and to the MCGA PS/2 models for that matter). Funnily enough, one magazine ran a series of compatibility tests (PC Tech Journal as I recall), and found that IBM's VGA card wasn't 100% IBM VGA compatible! That is, it doesn't behave exactly the same as the PS/2's VGA chipset. I guess the latter was the only real deal.

@@x86VileR Ah now only IBM could do something as hilarious and confusing as manufacture a VGA card that wasn't.

No I'm not on other platforms. Yeah VGA 9 pin shorted the pins for the second bit of EGA data together. One way or another this was asking for trouble.

Remember all early Sinclair computers, where power supply uses a 3.5mm mono plug. But so do the input and output of the cassette interface. At least on the Spectrum this doesn't seem to be lethal if you plug it in the wrong one; at least until you think the connection has gone bad and you wiggle it vigorously. Not sure about earlier ones, whether it was worse. That's definitely some cut throat BOM pruning though.

@@SianaGearz BOM pruning is a great term, haha! :) The funny thing is, past a certain point, volume-purchasing ½ n-thousand X and ½ n-thousand Y connectors can't have been that much dearer than purchasing just n-thousand of the X connector. Perhaps the most that would have really saved is a line on the bill of materials. :) That said, I have a definite hunch that the early popularity of DIN connectors for ALL THE THINGS might have had something to do with cost. Perhaps the alternatives weren't royalty-free at the time? Does someone know for sure?

@@ropersonline Where would the royalty come from? To collect royalty, you need an intellectual property that is somehow protected. Today this comes for example as trademark, where people expect to see a USB symbol on a USB plug, but you can't print that symbol if you aren't a member of this consortium, or they might whack you for trademark violation. Or ICs with magic firmware, which is copyright protected. But you can make a connector shaped like USB and nobody can tell you not to. Functional aspects of physical items can be protected by patent, but try patenting some pins and a guard piece? Good luck, you have tons of prior art to contend with. I think it's just economy of scale. All home audio equipment was full of DIN plugs, so there was exceptional production capacity present. Maybe supply overshot demand and the market got a little crowded. I do think the Cannon style D connectors were limited to a handful suppliers and mostly used industrially, but also they had been around for 20+ years by the late 70s, so if there had been any intellectual property protection, it would have long lapsed. Today, this excess capacity is gone. I bought (or forgot to buy but surveyed the prices for) some DIN5 plugs for MIDI purposes, and the pricing in China is kind of spicy now, since they fell out of use. I could buy the fundamentally more expensive to manufacture XLR plugs for a fraction of what DIN plugs cost today. Not to speak of 6.3mm and 3.5mm plugs which barely cost pennies per kilogram.

@@SianaGearz You make some great points. Of course another way to get royalties besides the trademarked logo route could be or might have been cartel economics: If most or substantially all the major suppliers insist you pay a cut for thing X, good luck trying to avoid that. In fairness, I don't actually know if that was applicable here, back then - and perhaps I should refrain from wasting more time on hypotheticals and speculation. :) Thanks for your reply.

Eh, a bit yes, a bit no. Depends what you were trying to do. CGA hi-rez (and low-rez composite) was at least equal to or marginally better than anything the Apple could do, at least until the GS came along. The "medium" resolution area is more variable, it would have been a bit better if it had an actual redefinable palette for the 4 colours (and it could be more reliably switched in the Hblank), but they literally ran out of space on the PCB even for the additional eight or so bits of storage that would have required (assuming the border colour and palette number registers would have been reused). On the other hand, 16-colour 80-column text mode with a proper 8-pixel wide font and 25 usable lines...

Nice, but which monitor is this? I couldn't tell from the photos. I can only see it is a Mitsubishi. Is that EGA or VGA?

@@PCRetroTech EUM 1491