This is an original CGA card, or color graphics adapter. It’s pretty huge. It’s amazing how many
chips are on here. That’s because at the time IBM was building these with all off
the shelf parts and other computer companies like Commodore were starting to build custom
video chips that would integrate nearly all of this sort of thing down to 1 chip.
I’m going to be using this original IBM XT to demonstrate some enhanced CGA cards of the era.
To make life a bit easier, I’ll be using two cards from Tex-Elec, one is this RAM card,
which will expand the RAM to 640K or beyond. And then I’ll also be using this card,
which uses an SD-Card to simulate a hard drive. That will save me a lot of time
dealing with floppy disks and such. I don’t have an original matching CGA monitor, but I
have this Tandy monitor, which is basically the exact same capabilities, so I’ll be using that.
Anyway, the CGA card was introduced in 1981 along with the original IBM PC. And while
people talk trash about the CGA card because of its terrible 4-color magenta palette,
I tend to give it a bit of a break for two reasons. Reason number one is that, well,
in 1981 there weren’t many computers that could do better. In fact, about the only other computers
of the time that had similar color graphics capabilities would have been the Apple II,
The Atari 400 and 800, The Commodore VIC-20, and the TI-99/4. And none of
these computers could do nice, crisp, color 80-column text like the CGA card could.
And reason number two that I give the CGA card a break is because it is highly misunderstood.
I believe the intention by the designers is that nice color graphics for games and such would be
displayed on a composite monitor. I’ve showed this before. And there isn’t a ton of software designed
for CGA composite mode, for reasons I discussed back in a previous video on the topic. Speaking
of, Petscii Robots for MS-DOS is nearly finished, and you can see here that we have included
composite mode support, and not only does it look pretty good for a machine made in 1981, but
it actually runs at a decent speed on this 4.77 Mhz computer, which is also always a challenge.
But for one reason or another, most users and developers opted to go with the RGBI monitor,
and thus composite mode was kind of relegated to history, and therefor
that’s why most people seem to remember CGA as that awful 4 color magenta palette.
So just a brief refresher… CGA had 2 or 16 color text. It had
a composite mode with 16 colors. A low res graphics mode with 2 or 4 colors,
and a hi res mode with just 2 colors. Now the interesting thing is, these limitations were
not due to the monitor type. Technically speaking the monitor always runs in 640 x
200 with 16 colors. The primary limitation is the 16K of video RAM on the CGA card.
The CGA card was the gold standard for video in the IBM world until 1984 when
the EGA card came out. But even then EGA was expensive so many people continued to use CGA
until VGA appeared in 1987. But, the whole point of this video today is to talk about
some of the competitors to the CGA card during the early years. The first one I
want to show you came out in 1982 and it’s called the Plantronics ColorPlus.
And here it is. These cards are pretty rare,
actually. There are far more clones of this card in existence than the original
card itself. But this is the real deal. You may notice it has a number of jumper wires.
But what’s more interesting is that the card is actually double-stacked. Yep, this is a
monster of an expansion card. I believe it has 32K of RAM, twice that of a regular CGA card.
The ColorPlus is fully CGA compatible, but adds the following graphics modes,
you get a new 16 color option in 320x200, and a 4 color option in hi-res mode.
So, lets put this thing in our IBM XT and try it out. As you can see, it runs on a standard
CGA monitor, so any monitor of era would work. Now for those highly familiar with CGA, you may notice
the font is slightly different than usual, keeping in mind that the font on CGA cards is in ROM and
cannot be altered. It actually looks kind of nice. I think I prefer it over the standard CGA font.
Unfortunately, finding any software from the era that supports it is nearly impossible. About
the only thing I’m aware of is C-show, a picture viewing program. And it doesn’t work by default,
you have to go into a menu and add Plantronics support. But that’s easy
enough to do. So for comparison, here’s a picture viewed in regular CGA mode,
and then the same picture viewed in plantronics mode. There’s quite a difference.
Now I’m going to show you what could have been. Benedikt Freisen recently created a
video driver for vintage Sierra games so that they now support Plantronics. By the way,
you may notice this card is also susceptible to the CGA snow problem in text mode that all early
CGA cards experienced. Anyway, let’s select the new Plantronics driver and give it a try.
This looks pretty much exactly like EGA, only for a product that came out 2 years earlier than EGA.
I suspect lack of any software support is likely what killed off this card and why few people have
even heard of it. But at least here you get an idea of what it could have done. Of course, there
is one more modern game that supports it, which is Planet X3. I hope to eventually add support into
the new Petscii Robots for MS-DOS some day, but it looks like the initial release won’t have support.
Of course, the interesting thing is, even after the Plantronics ColorPlus died off,
it lived on in a number of clone CGA cards, such as this one made by ATI, which not only supports
Plantronics modes, but but actually has 64K of video RAM so it can even do 16 colors in
high res mode. But one interesting thing to note is that this card does not have that unique font
of the original Plantronics card, and also does not suffer from the CGA snow problem. Likewise,
a LOT computer systems with integrated CGA cards made during the mid 1980s, such as this Commodore
PC-20, actually have plantronics capable cards on their motherboards. And at the time,
nobody seemed to even be aware it. And there was no software that supported it.
And so that’s why I said earlier that there were
far more clones of this card made than this card itself.
OK, so back to our timeline, The next product came out in 1983, and it’s call the Quadram Quadcolor.
These are super rare, and luckily this example actually has the original boxes, manuals, software
and everything. This is the main card here. And honestly, there’s nothing that special about it.
It’s really just a regular CGA card. I bet a lot of people had these in their systems and didn’t
think anything of it because it doesn’t really do anything different from any other CGA card.
What makes this product interesting is that it comes with this second card here called
the Quadcolor II. And the way this works is I believe it just doubles the video RAM. It
uses these connectors here to mount to the first board. So I’ll go ahead and connect
these two together like so. And by the way, this 15 pin connector is actually a
joystick port. It’s an odd thing to have as part of a video card, in my opinion.
This card basically adds the same video modes as the Plantronics card did, giving 16 color
graphics modes. However, the manual even claims a 136 color mode. But that’s most likely baloney
unless it is for composite mode only, because the CGA monitor can only do 16 colors, period.
Anyway, let’s put this in our IBM and test it out. I don’t think this card has been powered on
in decades. And well, it seems to work. Let’s try out the floppy disk and see if there is anything
on here to demonstrate the card. Well, the bad news is, the ONLY thing this disk does is patch
BASIC so that there are extra commands. And it doesn’t even support using a hard drive,
I have to use a floppy. And they don’t even give any example BASIC programs. OK, well, screw that.
OK.,. well, turns out the IBM is now experiencing some problems,
and I don’t have time to troubleshoot it right now. So let’s switch to this Packard Bell,
which is a little faster and a few years newer, but still an XT system.
Anyway, so I have a better option to show off this card. Apparently an old paint program called
Doctor Halo supports a number of graphics cards. And as you can see, the Quadcolor II is supported.
And once I select it, I even get an option for the mysterious 136 color option. Unfortunately, when
I tried to actually start the program, it turns out I’m missing the driver file for the Quadram
card. And apparently every copy of this program on the internet is also missing the same file.
I asked around on a number of forums, and even asked LGR if he’d look through his
giant boxed collection of MSDOS software, but unfortunately,
nobody could find an original Dr.Halo disk that hopefully wouldn’t be missing that file, so.
One other weird issue I noticed about it, though. I just ran deluxe paint and picked
a standard CGA mode. Although the problem appears in any program,
this one demonstrates it well. So, I’m here drawing away. But I have the computer in
4.77 MHz mode. As soon as I switch it into turbo mode, which I think is around 8 MHz,
the card no longer works reliably. You start getting garbage on the screen. In fact,
a flood fill is enough to cause the computer to lock up. So, this card does not like faster CPUs.
So anyway, I guess for now I’ll have to give up on the Quadram
card. So let’s move along to our next contender.
Another interesting contender popped up in 1983, known as the Olivetti M24. This
wasn’t a video card, as such, rather a whole computer. Now, I don’t have one of these,
but Jim Leonard does and he took some videos for me. This is actually an AT&T 6300,
which is basically a rebadged Olivetti. These actually use a proprietary 25-pin
connector. And they actually run at twice the vertical resolution as a regular CGA card,
which would make them incompatible with a regular CGA monitor. Two different monitor
options were available, a monochrome version, shown here, and a color version shown here.
This extra vertical resolution means the color text mode is beautiful. It looks just like text
on a VGA screen. And even when you are playing a game in CGA mode, one of the things you may notice
is how solid the pixels look because there are no visible scaliness like you would normally see.
Again, it looks very similar to how you would experience CGA graphics used on a VGA monitor.
In terms of video modes, the Olivetti didn’t really add a huge amount to CGA. In fact,
it actually eliminates the composite mode completely. But it does add one new mode,
which is a higher resolution monochrome mode. And while not that great for games,
Olivetti probably had business software in mind. Here’s an example of a word processor and how
regular hi-res CGA graphics would look. And then here’s the same software using the Olivetti mode.
So let’s take a look at some other software that made use of the Olivetti hi res mode. Here’s a
fractal generating program. And this is standard CGA hi res mode. And then here’s the same image
using the Olivetti mode. Likewise, here’s a photo being displayed in CSHOW using regular CGA hires,
and now the same photo using Olivetti’s mode. It is not an insignificant improvement! One other
bit of trivia is that the text mode could do underline, something usually reserved
for MDA displays of the era. Perhaps the best use for the new high res mode was for running
this newfangled thing called Microsoft Windows. And what you are looking at here is an example
of how Windows appeared on regular CGA cards using the hires mode. But let’s go into the
setup program and change it to Olivetti mode, and check it out. The fonts are much easier to read!
And so that is the Olivetti. So looking at our timeline so far, there are at least 3 enhanced
CGA options that came out before EGA. And the only one to have any real measure of
success in terms of software support was the Olivetti, and even that was limited
mostly to business or graphics software, and had little effect on the gaming market.
So moving ahead another year, not only does IBM bring out their EGA graphics card,
but also the PC-Jr, which came with its own enhanced CGA graphics system. The
PCjr was underpowered in other areas and was generally considered a flop. However,
the same graphics system was used by Tandy in their Tandy 1000 series of computers,
which was one of the best selling PC clones of the 1980s, spanning many
different systems. Unlike the PCJr, the Tandy systems did connect to a standard CGA monitor.
So, what new modes did Tandy bring to the table. Well,
we finally got a low res color mode that works on the RGBI monitor,
no longer requiring a composite monitor. And then we finally got a proper 16 color mode in 320x200,
the resolution most commonly used by games of the era. The high-res mode also get a 4 color
mode, and then later Tandy models even offered a 16 color mode there as well.
So, as an interesting comparison, this is how a game looked in standard 4 color CGA. But if you
had a Tandy, then your games would look like this, assuming the game supported the Tandy graphics
mode. Tandy systems also came with a 3 voice sound synthesizer, which meant gaming on the PC platform
could finally start to hold a candle to some of the competitors in the home computer market.
Not many games supported the use of the high res mode, but one example that does is Planet X3. So,
just for an interesting point of comparison. If you start the game normally on a Tandy
you’ll get a menu of a bunch of different video modes. Benedict Freisen has gone nuts
the last few years continuing to add more and more obscure video modes to the game. Anyway,
if you pick regular Tandy mode, it looks decently good. Certainly a lot better than 4 color CGA.
But here’s a bit of a secret. If you manually run the VGA version of the game on a Tandy,
it will only ask you for an audio selection. But it will use the VGA
graphics in a dither pattern on the Tandy in the high res mode… and dang, it looks great.
So it just goes to show Tandy graphics were certainly very capable when used correctly.
Another kind of obscure system, which I don’t have available to show is the Amstrad 1512,
which came out in 1986. It’s another one of those proprietary setups kind of like
the Olivetti. It came with a really bizarre setup where it was basically just a regular CGA system,
except it offers this one 16 color hi-res mode. And as you can imagine, not much software
supported it. Although I know I’m sounding like a broken record, but Planet X3 does support it,
and it looks pretty much just like the Tandy hi-res mode I showed you earlier.
And, there’s actually one last-ditch option I wanted to show you for upgrading your CGA
system. And this will sound a bit weird… but it’s an EGA card. But not just any EGA card,
this ATI EGA wonder, for example, came out in 1987, a bit late in the game for CGA folks. But
one of the interesting things this card offered was the ability to drive 3 different kinds of
monitors. Actually really more than 3 types if you include composite monitors. But anyway,
one of the types is an RGB color monitor, or basically a CGA monitor.
The way you do this is by changing the dip switches on the back of the card to tell
it which sort of monitor you want to use. So I’ll plug this in to my XT system here,
and let’s see if it works. And sure enough, it does!
So, if you take a look at all of the modes EGA cards offered,
what you’d be sacrificing by connecting a CGA monitor would be all of the high res
and 64 color modes offered by the EGA card. But, on the bright side,
you get to keep all of these modes, which is what most games were designed to use.
And so here’s playing a few different games.
While we’re at it, let’s try out Petscii Robots in EGA mode.
So, why would you want to do this? Well, the EGA wonder, as you can see,
was a $400 card when it came out. But keep in mind an EGA monitor would have cost you another
$400 or maybe more. So if you already had a CGA monitor, then this was still a huge step up.
And arguably, software support for EGA was much wider than any of the previous attempts
to improve a CGA card. So this was a pretty good upgrade option for people who already
had a CGA based computer. Of course, by 1987 the shift towards VGA had already started,
and by the 1990s almost all new computers were coming with VGA.
And that sort of wraps up our little journey through the Super CGA cards. I hope you learned
something new and interesting, but that’s it for the moment, so as always, thanks for watching!