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What's your max resolution?

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evildragon

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On your main or/and favorite vintage computer, what's the max resolution (and the colors at this resolution)

Mine is my IBM AT 286 Clone with 1MB RAM, and it's video boards ability to output 1280x1024@16 colors, right at DOS...

http://blackevilweredragon.spymac.com/286res1.jpg

http://blackevilweredragon.spymac.com/286res2.jpg

It also has a 100% customizable palette of 16.7 million colors...

http://blackevilweredragon.spymac.com/286-5.jpg

(does anyone btw know who manufactured that 286 clone? I don't recognize the logo)
 
I hate to reign in raw enthusiasm, but this kind of question really just winds up generating a lot of noise. IBM compatibles are especially a varied bunch, and of course there are going to be some very capable ISA bus cards running.

For vintage machines, it's more thoughtful to ask 'name your machine that has the lowest graphics resolution, if it does graphics at all'. Machines like the Timex Sinclair 1000 don't even do graphics technically .. it is all character set based. Apple ][s are another limited set of machines, but at least they have some graphics capability.
 
Hmmm on my Amstrad CPC6128 there's 3 screen resolutions:

The lowest which is 180x200? and allows 16 Colours.
The middle one - 320x200 and allows 4 Colours.
And the High Resolution is 640x200 in 2 Colours.

In terms of Games the lowest was generally used most for the colour, though quite a few games also used 320x200 in 4 colours which were good particularly if the graphics department knew how to make the games look more colourful than what they were.

I've been interested to see a game done in High Resolution mode though. Sure it's only Black and White - lots of Amstrad CPC games were imported from a Spectrum (which was made even easier with a small subroutine to make a CPC emulate a Spectrum screen), and some of them are in horrible Black and White - yet they didn't use the High Resolution mode (I thought I found a game in SWIV - sequel to Silkworm) which I thought did a clever demo trick of having a colourful panel alongside - it turned out it would have used too much memory!

There are a few CPC games which incorporate clever video tricks to the screen. The most popular is Overscan which fills the entire screen (including Border areas) with an image - this looks particularly good on a title screen. There's other effects for Stretching the screen, and splitting screen resolutions and so on and so forth! :-D Splitting Screen Resolution was done frequently when a game had a status bar at the bottom of the screen (not in the border area), though the game on the screen is in Low res - so 16 colours at the top and 4 usually on the bottom.

The other demo program which I liked allowed you to effectively split the screen with colours in the top portion and bottom portion - so effectively having all the colours on the screen at once (27 was the maximum palette) in Low Resolution and 8 in Medium Res and 4 in Low.
 
My IBM Model 25 PS/2 (XT Model), was modified for VGA, and now has a max of 640x480 16-shades of grey.. :p (i got the monochrome model)
 
Lowest would be a generic 386 clone that does 640x480 at 16-colors (?) I THINK. Its been a long time since I last fired it up. I dunno what my Mil-Spec machine does yet, I'm still rebuilding that one. (386)

Its about as far from vintage as it gets, but my main rig is 1680x1050. Thats quite a contrast. We've come a long, long way from 640x480....
 
If the character set is possible to redefine, possibly depending on the amount of RAM expansion, I'd say it defines as graphic capacity. To me the difference between a character based and truly bitmapped screen is that the latter may contain more pixels than can be represented if every printable character is displayed once on screen. It is possible that the Timex Sinclair 1000 (ZX-81) doesn't allow for custom characters. The VIC-20 does however, and while it lacks a bitmap mode, it can display a graphic resolution of anything from 8x8 to 200x256 or so, if screen is maximized.

In any case, since we're quite strict on what is truly vintage, I'd say that anything capable of doing 640x400 or better is borderline to not being vintage. That would be the VGA generation or newer. A vintage resolution to me would typically be 256x192, 320x200, 320x240 or perhaps up to 640x350 in 2-16, maximum 32 colours.
 
well, to me, a vintage computer like my 286 (which was built around when the clones came out), while still being vintage, could be upgraded with a more powerful video board..

the computer itself is still vintage, it's just got a better video board than it normally had..
 
carlsson wrote:

In any case, since we're quite strict on what is truly vintage, I'd say that anything capable of doing 640x400 or better is borderline to not being vintage. That would be the VGA generation or newer. A vintage resolution to me would typically be 256x192, 320x200, 320x240 or perhaps up to 640x350 in 2-16, maximum 32 colours.

A vintage Atari 8bit could handle 256 colours unfortunately. Also an Amstrad CPC Plus could do 4096 Colours - I'm unsure what the resolution is for that - I feel a CPC Plus only has the same Resolution as your standard CPCs, they would have been more popular perhaps if they have handled higher resolutions of the time (1990).
 
Ok then, forget about the colour resolution. Many of these computers have a wide palette, but not always capable of displaying all of these colours simultaneously.
 
carlsson wrote:

Ok then, forget about the colour resolution. Many of these computers have a wide palette, but not always capable of displaying all of these colours simultaneously.

Unfortunately I'm unsure if that applies to the Atari 1200XL. All I have in my book is it supports 5 Text Modes, 11 Graphics Modes and 256 Colours. To me that sounds like it can use the full 256 palette simultaneously.

The earlier Atari 400 & 800 have has a palette of 256 colours though is restricted to 16 colours. 3rd party software or demos did everything it could to ensure that they could tap into those extra colours at once though - as enthusiests will do everything to get all those colours happening at once (the same was virtually applied for the CPCs standard Palette of 27 Colours! :-D), I suppose it's where you're coming from though because there's the ordinary way of doing stuff and then their's the demo way of handling something - which is talking about having your own routines working to take an entire screen of graphics.

CP/M User.
 
Lemme pull out the old AT&T 6300 users guide...*blows dust off cover* nope not here, lets try the System Programmers guide...Ah, her we go. My AT&T 6300's screen resolutions are:

16 color high resolution: 600X200
16 color SUPER resolution 600X400
It also operates at lower res in B&W.

you can have 256 colors as well, if you use DEB to combine them.
 
My VAXstation 4000/60 has a 1280x1024x8bpp LCG adaptor connected to a 21" RGB monitor :)

This machine was released in 1991 by the way...
 
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GEM Computer Products 286/12
- 800X600 @16 bit color in Arachne, 1MB SVGA card (OTI RVGA 077)
- 640X480 @256 Color, Windows 3.1
 
Terry Yager wrote:

My Epson PX-8 laptop does 64 x 220 pixels, in graphics mode. I can't recall if any of my other CP/M machines are graphics-enabled or not...

I'm gonna need a refresher course as to what machines you have Terry! :-( Assuming their not oddball machines?
 
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