• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

EGA Games and Software

D

dongfeng

Veteran Member
Joined
Nov 16, 2003
Messages
1,348
Location
London, England
I've been resurrecting my IBM 5170 today - it's been out of use for a while after the hard drive died. I've been unable to fix the original drive, it has developed hundreds of bad sectors (head crash?). It sounded rather ill anyway.

I fitted a third generation 8MHz mainboard and coaxed my spare IBM0665 30MB drive into working again. I've also been unable to resurrect the second 360kB drive, and the spare I bought on eBay is also dead, so I fitted a 1.44MB in its place. I've kept the 1.2MB as A: :)

Now, can anyone recommend some fun games (or other software) that will show off the lovely EGA graphics? So far I've been playing Commander Keen, which runs very smoothly!
 
dongfeng said:
Now, can anyone recommend some fun games (or other software) that will show off the lovely EGA graphics? So far I've been playing Commander Keen, which runs very smoothly!
Click to expand...

Any and all Sierra games, for one. Just about everything from 1986-1990 supports EGA, only a few budget titles (eg. Wheel of Fortune) are CGA only.
 
mobygames.com has some really nice search features for asking these kinds of questions.

Here's the launching point for a list of all the DOS games that support EGA. Browse the list on the right for interesting titles, check some screenshots and see if it's something that you'd want to have in your showoff collection.
http://www.mobygames.com/browse/games/dos/tic,2/ti,3/

yay for mobygames!
 
i found some games here. they are in part 3. if you wanted i could upload just the games to hotfile or rapidshare for you. there is 112 games and they take up 70mb on disk. i have not tested the games on a older computer.
 
Games with separate 16 color and 256 releases

Games with separate 16 color and 256 releases

Fallo said:
Any and all Sierra games, for one. Just about everything from 1986-1990 supports EGA, only a few budget titles (eg. Wheel of Fortune) are CGA only.
Click to expand...

Sierra adventures are excellent examples of EGA goodness! :) Also, many adventure games in the very early nineties (from both Sierra, LucasArts, and Delphine) were released in separate 16 color EGA and 256 color VGA versions. The 16 color versions would often (but not always) also support CGA 4 color mode. I guess that fitting both the 16 color and 256 color graphics data in a single package would require too many floppies. Apparently, there was no practical way to downconvert 256 graphics to 16 color mode on the fly back then (at least not in a quality comparable to optimizing for lower color modes by hand).

Adventure games off the top of my head that were released in such separate versions:

Kings Quest V
The Secret of Monkey Island (the first one)
Cruise for a Corpse

I know there are definitely more.
 
Last edited:
digger said:
Sierra adventures are excellent examples of EGA goodness! :) Also, many adventure games in the very early nineties (from both Sierra, LucasArts, and Delphine) were released in separate 16 color EGA and 256 color VGA versions. The 16 color versions would often (but not always) also support CGA 4 color mode. I guess that fitting both the 16 color and 256 color graphics data in a single package would require too many floppies. Apparently, there was no practical way to downconvert 256 graphics to 16 color mode on the fly back then (at least not in a quality comparable to optimizing for lower color modes by hand)
Click to expand...

Not necessarily; some games such as Wolfpack and Oil's Well supported CGA, EGA, and VGA all at once. Others (Bubble Bobble, Batman, Simpsons Arcade Game), claim to have VGA support, but merely run in EGA 320x200 mode and alter the color palette on VGA. If you run these games on a real EGA card, you'll get the default 16 colors. You say that 16-color games didn't always support CGA, but the only one I know that doesn't is Will Harvey's Zany Golf (that one runs in EGA and Tandy, but curiously not CGA). Most 256-color games on the other hand supported nothing but VGA.
 
Others (Bubble Bobble, Batman, Simpsons Arcade Game), claim to have VGA support, but merely run in EGA 320x200 mode and alter the color palette on VGA. If you run these games on a real EGA card, you'll get the default 16 colors.
Click to expand...
Is there a visible difference between VGA with an EGA palette and true 16 color EGA? Is the resolution the same?
Your answer may force me to buy an EGA monitor, so be careful. ;)
 
hargle said:
Is there a visible difference between VGA with an EGA palette and true 16 color EGA? Is the resolution the same?
Your answer may force me to buy an EGA monitor, so be careful. ;)
Click to expand...

In terms of colors, no. However, real EGA (and CGA) has a different scan rate than VGA and also refreshes at 60Hz instead of 70Hz, so it is noticeably more flickery. The wider scanlines also make for a subtle visual difference.

As I pointed out, some games run in EGA mode, but alter the colors on VGA (as you can change the palette in any mode; even CGA). Usually, you'd get a much more tasteful color scheme than the garish EGA palette. You can see an example of this by running Bubble Bobble in DOSBox. First, set it to VGA. You only get 16 colors, but they're nice ones. Now switch DOSBox to Tandy mode and run it again and you'll get the much uglier EGA/Tandy palette.
 
I dowloaded those files from the 386 web site, and found a old virus(forgot which one) lurking in one of the files! After D/L the files, F-secure found it and deleted the file, so watch out old bugs never die!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top