bad EGA on modern cards? \ VOGONS

bad EGA on modern cards?

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First post, by Pelger

Posted on 2018-07-15, 07:30

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I was testing just for fun some games on a "modern" computer that has a nvidia GT630 pci express card, and I found out EGA and CGA look wrong, the colors are greenish. VGA looks perfect.
The monitor is a CRT AOC, and it's working fine. The same monitor looks perfect on a S3 trio PCI card, both EGA and CGA look right, so it's not a monitor problem. I tested a different monitor on the GT630 (an IBM 8518) and it looks wrong too.
I thought "maybe nvidia cards don't support EGA" so I tried the same games on a notebook that has a GT9600m, and it looked right, so at least the 9600 supports proper EGA colors.

so, the tests were like this:

card - monitor - result
gt630 - aoc - wrong ega and cga, perfect vga
gt630 - ibm - wrong ega and cga, perfect vga
s3 - aoc - perfect cga,ega and vga
s3 - ibm - perfect cga,ega and vga
gt9600 - notebook - perfect cga,ega and vga

by the way, I booted in real DOS on all the tests, and the games were arkanoid 2, test drive, prehistorik 1, and zak mckraken.

in zak mckraken you can change the mode on the fly, switching to vga mode fixed the problem on the gt630, it looked how it's supposed to look. (keep in mind it's not "real vga" 256 colors, it's the same 16 EGA colors and resolution, but internally that "vga" mode must be initializing the card in a way that's properly supported unlike the ega mode).

so, is it a well known "feature" that modern cards have a poor EGA support?.

here's a picture to illustrate the problem:

ps: I wasn't sure to post this here on video or to post it in DOS.

Reply 1 of 8, by JayCeeBee64

Posted on 2018-07-15, 18:08

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Pelger wrote:
is it a well known "feature" that modern cards have a poor EGA support?.

That's pretty much it. CGA/EGA looks terrible on recent video cards - that "pea soup green" tint is everywhere and nothing can be done about it.

Commander Keen 4 on my GeForce GT640

Commander Keen 4 on my GeForce 6600

SVGA modes are also messed up, you get a lot of flickering and lousy frame rates 😒

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 2 of 8, by Pelger

Posted on 2018-07-16, 03:47

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that's sad, I hate it every time modern computers lose some capability that old computers could do and it costs nothing and is not that hard to just keep it working.

Reply 3 of 8, by leileilol

Posted on 2018-07-16, 05:41

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JayCeeBee64 wrote:

that "pea soup green" tint is everywhere

surely you mean "ski free dog pee is everywhere"

long live PCem

Reply 4 of 8, by Jo22

Posted on 2018-07-16, 07:30

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🤣

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In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

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Reply 5 of 8, by JayCeeBee64

Posted on 2018-07-16, 15:38

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Pelger wrote:
that's sad, I hate it every time modern computers lose some capability that old computers could do and it costs nothing and is not that hard to just keep it working.

It's the price of 'progress'. Sad but true 😐

leileilol wrote:
JayCeeBee64 wrote:

that "pea soup green" tint is everywhere

surely you mean "ski free dog pee is everywhere"

That's a better way of describing it 🤣

Ooohh, the pain......

Reply 6 of 8, by RichB93

Posted on 2018-07-20, 01:53

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Frankly I'm amazed that they would even retain EGA compatibility on such new cards. To be honest, it could've been dropped 10 or 15 years ago and no one would've cared (except for people here).

Reply 7 of 8, by swaaye

Posted on 2018-07-20, 03:28

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Yeah I'm surprised it works at all.

I wonder if that DOS 2D stuff is done in software now. Like XP GDI acceleration was switched from dedicated hardware to being pixel shader based with DX10+ cards.

Reply 8 of 8, by Jo22

Posted on 2018-07-20, 08:15

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I wonder the same. It doesn't make sense that CRTC logic is still implemented in silicon,
if the whole purpose of VGA/VGA text-mode in these days is to allow for installing an operating system that has no special drivers
during the installation process. Even VBE is nolonger as relevant as it was years ago. Linux/BSD now have a lot of drivers on-board.

RichB93 wrote:
Frankly I'm amazed that they would even retain EGA compatibility on such new cards.
To be honest, it could've been dropped 10 or 15 years ago and no one would've cared (except for people here).

That's probably true. On the other hand, EGA is closely related to VGA. Even the default palettes do mimic EGA.
That relationship is/was so close, that the average Super EGA card of the late 80s did support 640x480x16 mode.
In the extreme, they even supported an 800x600 mode, as Super VGA did (ex. VESA VBE mode 6Ah).
See Is there a win3x EGA driver that supports more than 640x350 resolution?

"Time, it seems, doesn't flow. For some it's fast, for some it's slow.
In what to one race is no time at all, another race can rise and fall..." - The Minstrel

//My video channel//

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