reenigne wrote:

SquallStrife wrote:

8088 Domination wouldn't run, but then again this system doesn't currently have a SoundBlaster. I tried with the /q switch, but the image is garbled beyond recognition.

Depending on the type of garbling, that may indicate that the pixel clock is not synchronized to the colour carrier. Another composite CGA game to try is VileRancour's recent port of Commander Keen 4 to composite CGA.

Jumping back to this real quick, the corruption was basically random pixels filling up any part of the screen that wasn't being updated.

But adding a sound card has fixed this, it now runs correctly just like the other unit posted earlier:

Scali wrote:

schadenfreude1 wrote:

This is interesting. I assume these were sold for computer users? Growing up, on all the CRTs I used for console gaming, I never noticed the empty lines because of the color blooming and lack of sharpness. Can you point me to some of these devices so I can read more about them?

They were very common in the Amiga world, as I already mentioned.
Mainly for using a 'professional' SVGA monitor on a standard Amiga. Which became popular in the mid-90s for people who were still using their Amigas, and SVGA monitors had become cheap and commonplace. They were nice upgrades/replacements for the aging Amiga monitors.

Is it something like this ? : http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/highgraph
I'm no Amiga guru, but I think I've seen some adverts for those devices in magazines from the late 80s (88 onwards) to early 90s (~93 ?).

This one supports a proper resolution of 832×620 pixels (non-interlaced!) in 4096 colours @31.25KHz (h-freq.)
That's Super VGA. If this would had been a stock item in the A2000, the Amiga may had lasted a bit longer.

Our old 20" monitor we had in the early/mid 90s was Super VGA capable, by the way, even tough it wasn't multi-sync.
It had BNC connectors for RGB and H/V sync on the back and several control knobs for h/v-sync.

As far as I remember, this was an issue when switching between 640x480 and 800x600 VGA modes.
I think we left it configured for 640x480. Or did we use an in-between resolution for Windows? Can't remember anymore.

Anyway, what we had wasn't a typical "VGA monitor", but a professional RGB HV monitor for all kind of serious use.
It's a shame I can't remember its name anymore.

SquallStrife wrote:

Jumping back to this real quick, the corruption was basically random pixels filling up any part of the screen that wasn't being updated.

But adding a sound card has fixed this, it now runs correctly just like the other unit posted earlier:

That's interesting! Perhaps that demo is using its internal mod(?) player for timing.
Sorry, it's been a while since I ran this demo.. 😅

Jo22 wrote:

Is it something like this ? : http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/highgraph

No, that seems to be an actual graphics card.
They were usually external devices that plugged into the video port, see here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fixer

Commodore did actually put a flicker fixer in the Amiga 3000 as standard (the Amiga 2000 is about as old as VGA, if not older, so back then it wouldn't make sense to have support for VGA).

Jo22 wrote:

That's interesting! Perhaps that demo is using its internal mod(?) player for timing.
Sorry, it's been a while since I ran this demo.. 😅

It could be related to that, yes. It uses a streaming WAV player from disk basically. And the music is used to keep the video in sync. This is done by using the interrupts that the SB generates when a buffer has finished playing (the buffers have a fixed size, so you know exactly how many samples have been played, and as such you know how much frame time has passed).
Perhaps the workaround when no SB is present is not working correctly on this system.

Scali wrote on 2016-09-25, 23:33:

Isn't the answer to the original question simply "image quality"? VGA monitors had to be capable of 400 and 480-line modes. That […]
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Isn't the answer to the original question simply "image quality"?
VGA monitors had to be capable of 400 and 480-line modes. That meant they had to have quite a fine raster/small dot pitch. Which means if you were to actually feed such a monitor a 200-line signal, you'd clearly see the black spacing between the scanlines, and it would look horrible.

I actually tried to connect my Amiga to an Eizo multisync SVGA monitor back in the day... It was a 256-line signal, and it worked, but it looked horrible, with all the black between the scanlines. Which is why usually for Amigas, so-called scandoublers and 'flicker fixers' are recommended: devices that perform the scandoubling for you, and can convert the Amiga's interlaced 512-line signals to progressive scan. These will give you an acceptable image.
On VGA this was built in, so be happy.

VGA was never going to be signal-compatible with CGA/EGA monitors anyway... Aside from the different scanrate, the 200/400-line modes also had a 70 Hz refresh rate, and then there's of course the analog RGB.

Resurrecting this ancient thread to say, if you think this looks horrible we cannot be friends.

32" of analog RGB EGA-palleted 15kHz goodness - VGATV kicks ass

it seems to produce an output that is more or less consistent with what the teradrive was doing - a CGA-type 80-column text mode and 200p60 or 240p60 graphics modes