Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-16, 21:11:
But isn't that true for EGA altogether ? 😕
When I was very young in the 90s, I pretty much associated EGA as a sub mode of VGA.
Just like that 256c MCGA mode of 320x200 pels..
Yeah, it's true that EGA's "reign" was brief... around a couple of years, starting ca. 1987 in the US, probably a little later elsewhere.
IBM did introduce the EGA in late '84, shortly after the AT; but it actually took a year or more for the 3rd parties to develop compatible chipsets, which drastically reduced component counts (and therefore prices) compared to IBM's discrete-logic monstrosity. IIRC Chips & Technologies was the first one out with an EGA chipset.
Of course, the same companies learned pretty soon to do the same with VGA, so EGA wasn't long for the market. When it comes to the home market specifically, it's easy to date by looking at video support in games (not business software): EGA support started cropping up around 1987, but only two years later VGA support was already becoming pretty common (sometimes in the guise of "MCGA").
Jo22 wrote on 2020-09-16, 21:11:VileR wrote on 2020-09-16, 20:29:
By the time EGA became commonplace, it was mostly compact chipset-based clone cards, and almost all of those had 256K on board from the get go.
It did ? 😳 Or was this more of an overseas thing (USA, Canada) ? I heard that the IBM PC was very popular there and wiped the homecomputer market pretty soon.
I ask, becaue I'm from Western Europe and I have never seen an EGA clone at flea markets in the last 20 years.
As far as I know, even in the US/Canada it was mostly the clones that did it. IBM's prices throughout the 1980s were never modest enough to do well in the home.
Here, in Israel, my dad upgraded our XT clone from monochrome CGA to color EGA in 1990 or so. I don't know what make and model (was too young to care), but it was one of the short clone cards, and definitely 256K from what the VBIOS reported on every boot. 😉
As a "time capsule" sort of thing, here's a comparison of some EGA boards available in the US ca. late 1986: https://archive.org/details/PC_Tech_Journal_v … ge/n85/mode/2up
A couple of things are immediately noticeable in that table: 1) - every single EGA card except IBM's comes with 256K on board; 2) - the non-IBM cards are much, *much* cheaper. And these are all full-sized boards - laters one were shorter, with more tightly integrated components, which helped prices go down even further.
By the way, speaking of non-PC platforms, this reminds me of the Sharp AX line of Personal Computers. It had JEGA, Japanese EGA.
In EGA mode, it ran either in IBM mode (640x350 pels) or in its native mode (640×480 pels).
Yeah, back then the Japanese always seemed to get hi-res before everyone else, chiefly because of text requirements. IBM itself had the Japanese version of the JX, with an optional board supporting 720x512... and then the PS/55 (Japanese version of the PS/2), with a 1024x768 display adapter.
IIRC, the "AX" thing was a Microsoft-led attempt at a standard for Japanese text display, but IBM Japan stuck to their PS/55 ways and later made it into their own generic standard with PC-DOS/V, and MS ended up jumping on that bandwagon.
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