So what good is EGA anyway?

[tezza]

The text on an EGA screen is much superior to CGA text.
I have EGA installed on all of my vintage PC's , just find
the CGA too hard on my eyes

And some games that support EGA, like SIMCITY look really
nice on EGA, almost as good as VGA.

You can say that again. I replaced the CGA card on my AT with an EGA and boy, what a difference!

Tez

 

[Trixter]

What software (outside of Win <=3.0) can make use of EGA modes (including games)? Is it worth the trouble of bothering?

Since all VGA cards emulate EGA perfectly (minus the video interrupt, but nothing used that), there really is no reason to bother with EGA, except maybe to assemble a historically-accurate IBM AT.

 

[H-A-L-9000]

There are at least two EGA games that don't work on VGA:

- Gauntlet uses the display end interrupt and changes some CRTC registers
- Beverly Hills Cop uses a panning trick that is only possible on EGA

 

[Jorg]

You can say that again. I replaced the CGA card on my AT with an EGA and boy, what a difference!

Tez

I have a QuadEga EGA card and a Paradise EGA. One of them is giving a crisp clear text as I remember from EGA, but the other just looks like CGA. I must be doing something wrong.

 

[H-A-L-9000]

I have a QuadEga EGA card and a Paradise EGA. One of them is giving a crisp clear text as I remember from EGA, but the other just looks like CGA. I must be doing something wrong.

Most likely the DIP switches on your "bad" card are set to CGA monitor compatibility.

 

[Jorg]

Most likely the DIP switches on your "bad" card are set to CGA monitor compatibility.

Probably.. only it is the only setting I'm getting a picture with until now. Graphic mode is ok.

 

[Trixter]

There are at least two EGA games that don't work on VGA:

- Gauntlet uses the display end interrupt and changes some CRTC registers
- Beverly Hills Cop uses a panning trick that is only possible on EGA

I'm very familiar with EGA and VGA register programming, but I can't think of a single technique for display positioning on EGA that wouldn't work on VGA (unless it also used the video interrupt). If you know what that technique was, I'd like to learn more about it.

 

[H-A-L-9000]

Now that I've seen the problem again (many ISA VGA cards have a jumper for the interrupt) I remember: On VGA you have to program the splitscreen value to twice of the line you want it at because of double scanning. Gauntlet doesn't do that and thus the playing field is cut in half and at the bottom the backbuffer is visible.

 

[swaaye]

just a little fyi... for quick game graphics comparisons, one can use DosBox in CGA, EGA, Tandy, PCJr as well as the usual VGA modes.

My first comp was a Tandy 1000TX and I definitely appreciated the 16-color graphics. I've only briefly seen EGA hardware in person and I really can't remember it. One of my friends had a CGA XT and yeah there's no arguing over the improvement you get with 16-color display hardware!

 

[Trixter]

I never heard of EGA having hardware scrolling either.

It definitely did, and toward the end a lot of games used it for either pageflipping or actual scrolling. Commander Keen comes to mind. Splitscreen too

 

[Trixter]

Now that I've seen the problem again (many ISA VGA cards have a jumper for the interrupt) I remember: On VGA you have to program the splitscreen value to twice of the line you want it at because of double scanning. Gauntlet doesn't do that and thus the playing field is cut in half and at the bottom the backbuffer is visible.

Wow, I never would have thought of that! Thanks for the info!

 

[Fallo]

On VGA you have to program the splitscreen value to twice of the line you want it at because of double scanning. Gauntlet doesn't do that and thus the playing field is cut in half and at the bottom the backbuffer is visible.

Sort of like the 160x100 mode. To display that properly on VGA, you have to set the Maximum Scan Line register to 3 instead of 1 (as with CGA), otherwise the graphics will only fill the top half of the screen.

It definitely did, and toward the end a lot of games used it for either pageflipping or actual scrolling. Commander Keen comes to mind. Splitscreen too

You're not just talking about CRTC registers 12 and 13 (Start Address High and Low), are you? They can be used for page flipping/scrolling even on CGA (though only in text mode there).

 

[Lutiana]

Only one problem is that you have to be about 40 years old to sucessfully answer the questions required to start the game...

All the answers are on Al Lowe's website.

But I am 30 and I can actually answer them all pretty easily without internet assistance, in fact IIRC I could get past that screen back then too (after a few trial and error start ups).

 

[Marrr]

Just theorizing here, but there may be differences: PCjr outputs 4 bits of color (RGBI) and EGA outputs 6 (RGBR'G'B'), so the 16 colors you can see on an EGA you can pick freely from a 64-color palette. There's also hardware panning/scrolling on EGA.
I don't remember if those features were actually used by CGA/PCjr/EGA games, though...

OK, finally found some time to play a few games under Dosbox, including Prehistorik in two 320x200x16 modes: PCjr/Tandy and EGA, and...

Yes, there's a difference:
in Tandy mode when you reach the edge of a screen the next screen appears immediately,
in EGA mode it smoothly scrolls to the next screen.

 

[digger]

90% of the time I use the CGA mode if the game supports it because of the slowdown in EGA mode. Examples would be starfleet 2 and starflight 1&2.

But the depressing 4 color palettes look so much worse! It's such a step down compared to the lush 16 color EGA palette. You lose a lot of the game's admosphere in CGA mode. Also, since the graphics and artwork in EGA games were designed for 16 colors, the dithering and color reduction in CGA mode makee the games look even worse, unlike games that were designed for CGA in the first place, and try to make maximum use of it, like Digger and Alley Cat.

My advice: if a game was designed for EGA graphics, play it in EGA mode, even if it is a bit slower.

Oh, and it's not always the case that EGA is slower, since the hardware on an EGA card was considerably more advanced. For one thing, it used much faster video memory than CGA cards.

 

[Fallo]

But the depressing 4 color palettes look so much worse! It's such a step down compared to the lush 16 color EGA palette. You lose a lot of the game's admosphere in CGA mode.

The EGA/Tandy palette isn't all that great, since it consists of very bright, strong primary colors. Kind of garish if you ask me, but it was all that could be done with TTL RGB.

Also, since the graphics and artwork in EGA games were designed for 16 colors, the dithering and color reduction in CGA mode makee the games look even worse, unlike games that were designed for CGA in the first place, and try to make maximum use of it, like Digger and Alley Cat.

CGA can look decent with creative use of dithering/palettes/background colors. Some developers like Sierra did it well. Others (eg. LucasArts) just filtered the EGA graphics down to four colors, left them with the default high intensity cyan/magenta/white palette, and called it a day.

My advice: if a game was designed for EGA graphics, play it in EGA mode, even if it is a bit slower.

Again, depends on the game. For example, I always found Double Dragon better in CGA because the scrolling is smoother and the EGA graphics aren't very good, anyway.

On the other hand, King's Quest IV looks miles better in EGA (Sierra's graphics artists were some of the best in the business).

Oh, and it's not always the case that EGA is slower, since the hardware on an EGA card was considerably more advanced. For one thing, it used much faster video memory than CGA cards.

Yes, but EGA uses 32k+ of video memory, so the CPU also has to move quite a bit more graphics data around than with CGA. Games written in assembly language are usually pretty fast, but interpreted stuff can be a slug in EGA.