New answers tagged vga
2
An EGA or VGA game that used 16-color graphics mode could exploit those cards' bit-planar architecture to create either a 7-color foreground and 2-color background, a 3-color foreground and 4-color background, or 1-color foreground and 8-color background, without having to do any save/restore operations on the background. I don't know to what extend games ...
7
The standard text mode for VGA DOS was 80 by 25 characters, which translated to a resolution of 720 by 400 (characters of 9 by 16 pixels) per the table on VGA text mode page in Wikipedia.
One option would be to change the mode and see if you can get the resolution high enough for your converter, but that would depend on the capabilities of the graphics ...
6
Geenimetsuri's answer about colour cycling is a very good point that deserves a demonstration. :)
Here's a GIF taken from the end of the first level of Episode 1 of Jazz Jackrabbit.
Jazz Jackrabbit uses Mode X for the main gameplay screen. Mode X is a 256 colour mode which provides a single bitmapped layer of indexed colour pixels, like mode 13h. However, ...
47
The manual says that the smallest resolution it can handle is 800x600.
That is almost certainly the key. Original VGA supported 640x480 16-colors and 720x400 (essentially a small step up from the 720x350 monochrome (MDA) text, but with color). While VGA has come to mean "any video card and monitor that uses a blue 15-pin connector" that's not what ...
answered Sep 6 at 1:58
manassehkatz-Moving 2 Codidact
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2
The movement of the text is so smooth it appears to be hardware scrolling like you
would see on the NES or Super Nintendo but as far as I'm aware MS-DOS PCs don't have
that.
To add a bit on the above excellent answers and comments...
You had several other tricks you could employ on a PC to "emulate" smooth scrolling.
First one, and very widely ...
22
DOS is almost surely not outputting 800x600 or up, and is probably in the ballpark of 720x350 or thereabouts. Further, it's likely 70Hz, which this adapter may not like.
I'd recommend you get a display that can use the signal from card natively -- any old multiscan CRT and lots of early LCDs can do this -- but if you're determined to use this adapter, you ...
-2
The very idea of hardware full screen bitmap layer overlays in the Amiga OCS was based on the software layer compositing done by game developers for Apple II and early MSDOS games (Budge's Pinball Construction Set, Artwick's Flight Simulator, et.al.) Budge's blit routines, in turn, were influenced by bitblit concepts that propagated to Apple Lisa group from ...
31
Seems like VGA only has one background layer, it appears to be a typical bitmap screen like most home computers of the 80s (Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 etc.) where each pixel's color is stored in a section of memory that can be written to directly.
Most video cards of the day could theoretically have up to four pages of video memory, as they had 256 KiB of ...
10
Is it on its own plane somehow?
No, as you assumed, VGA has only one plane(*1).
Is every letter a "mouse cursor?" Or, is the screen constantly being redrawn with the letters in their new position?
The latter. Most likely it's composed of a background image moved into the frame buffer, overlaid by the text layer. (*2)
The movement of the text is ...
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