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Drivers for Hercules Monochrome Graphics Card

404TimeNotFound

Experienced Member
Joined
Apr 9, 2014
Messages
54
Location
Fort Wayne, IN
I have a (hopefully) simple request, does anyone know where I can get the drivers for a Hercules monochrome graphics card? Thanks in advance.
 
It's the standard Hercules Graphics Card, not the plus or color and I read somewhere you switched between text and graphics mode with the card so i just assumed you required some form of drives (or maybe software?). I'm trying to run it with some old DOS games I have on five inch floppies. They launch but the graphics portion of the game doesn't appear on-screen (in example the pac man knockoff I have will launch, and the text for the game appears such as the score, etc. but the graphical portion of the game isn't shown).
 
Most business applications that used graphics modes came with Hercules drivers after about 1986. HGC came with 4 drivers for Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony, Framework, and MS Word 3. I don't know where to find an image of the original HGC disks; I don't have one.

For games, text only games will work. A few graphical games were written for Hercules modes. Some CGA games can run if you load a driver like SIMCGA. Other CGA, EGA, and VGA games will not run on a Hercules card. Sorry, Hercules was not commonly supported by game authors.
 
It's the standard Hercules Graphics Card, not the plus or color and I read somewhere you switched between text and graphics mode with the card so i just assumed you required some form of drives (or maybe software?). I'm trying to run it with some old DOS games I have on five inch floppies.

For games to show graphics on the Hercules, they need to explicitly support it. Some games need to be told to drive Hercules, which you would do with a setup program or install program.

If the game supports CGA but not Hercules, you can get it to work (with a small speed penalty) by running a CGA "simulation" program before starting the game. The program loads in memory and translates CGA graphics to Hercules graphics while the game runs. "SIMCGA" is a common, popular program for doing this, you should be able to find it easily with a google search.

If you've done all this and the game still doesn't work, let us know which game(s) you're having trouble with.
 
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