First post, by Pelger
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.