Grzyb wrote on 2023-12-29, 22:12:

Also, game creators never really cared about HGC - vast majority of games use some CGA emulation, while using the native 720x348 mode is rare.
So I would expect that usage of additional features of the 720x348 mode would be even rarer.

That might be true. The majority of games aren't being optimized for Hercules.

But still, Hercules was an industry standard back in the 80s.
I can't imagine people doing office work for months with a CGA setup.
That thick 80 column font alone is eyestraining.

No, MDA monitors with a long persistence were clearly a preference here - which Hercules Monochrome could continue to support.
(EGA card, too, but that combination had even less software support).

Games that did support Hercules natively were usually of higher end quality.
Like simulators (MS Flight Simulator, SimCity, SimAnt, The Colony, golf games), board games (chess, mahjongg) or card games (poker, black jack etc).

Some adventures games, too. Wonderland by Magnetic Scrolls comes to mind. It supports graphics for Hercules, but not CGA.
It's one of those higher class games I'm thinking of.

Edit: Quite a number of noname video cards could do either CGA or Hercules+MDA.
They had a switch or jumper to select the mode. And 64KB of memory. 😁

Edit: Monochrome TTL monitors were fairly simple in their design. They were rather light-weight and didn't cost that much either.

Out of any 8 bit home computer earlier adopters who then got a PC or XT with CGA graphics, I bet the only ones that thought they got a graphics upgrade were the ones who had ZX80/81 (Timex 1000) or who had CP/M boxes with no graphics at all. For some it may have seemed a downgrade. Hercules on the other hand felt more like higher end graphics when in high res mode... especially if you were aware of the high res monochrome workstations. First half of the 90s when I got two fixer upper Amstrads, PC-1512 and PC-1640, had mono for the 1512 and color for the 1640 and I could not decide which of those I liked best, on the one hand color, on the other high res and low eyestrain. Had more games working on color, but availability was limited, pre-home-internet, and being past their peak it was only bargain bin stuff would work from stores. Also hercules was actually useful longer than CGA, I have actually websurfed on Win 3.1 with hercules driver and used linux and X window on it, not on the PC-1512 tho, 386+.

^Thanks a lot for the explanation, that's what I meant to express.
I've always seen HGC and CGA as some kind of unequal sisters.
They're related on a technical level (same CRTC, similar framebuffer locations), but have different priorities.
Hercules is fine for all sorts of GUIs, while CGA has BIOS level support and a large game library.
Another "feature" of CGA maybe is its compatibility with bog standard TVs or video monitors.
Back in the day, this was useful for home users (amd industrial machines w/ little mono CRTs).

PS: I remember that back in the 80s, my dad had owned a grayscale handy scanner by Logitech or Cameron (?).
The pictures he originally had scanned required a Hercules graphics card for display.
- Back in the 2000s, I rediscovered them and used DOSBox's Hercules machine mode to check them out.
So Hercules surely was kind of relevant in the DTP sector, too, I assume.
All sorts of early b/w or grayscale digitizers had a use for the high resolution.
Dithering works better in 720x348 than 640x200.

Edit: That reminds me of the era of b/w cliparts.
Back in the mid-late 80s and early 90s, those mono cliparts could still be found on invoices and business cards.

Edit:

Hercules on the other hand felt more like higher end graphics when in high res mode... especially if you were aware of the high res monochrome workstations.

That reminds me of something I haven't consciously perceived before, maybe.
These green/amber monitors do look somewhat similar to classic oscilloscopes.
Both have that laboratory/professional feel to it..

Jo22 wrote on 2023-12-30, 01:39:

That might be true. The majority of games aren't being optimized for Hercules. […]
Show full quote

That might be true. The majority of games aren't being optimized for Hercules.

But still, Hercules was an industry standard back in the 80s.
I can't imagine people doing office work for months with a CGA setup.
That thick 80 column font alone is eyestraining.

Yes, I've already posted about that - Re: Best CGA & Hercules games

And it makes me chuckle whenever I see modern gamers talking about "PC Master Race", as I well remember it when PC was the very opposite of gaming platform 🤣

I guess it was a little bit different in the USA - there was some gaming stuff already in the 80s: PCjr, Tandy, Adlib...
But that wasn't popular in western Europe, and pretty much unheard of in eastern Europe - until the early 90s, the PC was treated as a glorified typewriter, and who needs color monitor when the final result is supposed to be a black-on-white printout?

So, of course, the default video was "Hercules"...
well, actually the cheapest Far Eastern clone of Hercules Graphics Card, plus the cheapest Far Eastern monochrome monitor.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-12-29, 21:24:

Now on Nec 71vm instead of Nec 1970nxp...slighlty more problematic (last lines are always doubled) but hercules is no nice...to me better then CGA.

The first game in that post is Leisure Suit Larry, but what is the second one? Looks like a conversion of some long-forgotten Japanese classic. Pray, do tell!

Grzyb wrote on 2023-12-30, 05:16:

well, actually the cheapest Far Eastern clone of Hercules Graphics Card, plus the cheapest Far Eastern monochrome monitor.

I think this was the deciding factor. We got a lot of HGC PCs in the early nineties not because we thought they were the best, but because they were the cheapest (which for us in Poland still meant VERY expensive).

OldCat wrote on 2024-01-02, 10:20:

Grzyb wrote on 2023-12-30, 05:16:

well, actually the cheapest Far Eastern clone of Hercules Graphics Card, plus the cheapest Far Eastern monochrome monitor.

I think this was the deciding factor. We got a lot of HGC PCs in the early nineties not because we thought they were the best, but because they were the cheapest (which for us in Poland still meant VERY expensive).

Maybe, but Hercules hardware (card + monitor) was not very complicated to begin with.

So with the IBM tax being removed, there wasn't much to charge money for from a production cost point of view.

The heaviness of the monitor's plastic chassis was the most notable sign for quality, maybe.

Electronically, the MDA/MGA monochrome monitor is essentially the bare CRT and a little TTL driver/amplifier & power supply board.
The rest of the chassis is filled with air.

The underlying technology is more simple than a black/white TV (equals video monitor with an UHF tuner).
Thus making it even cheaper to produce than a composite video monitor (mono or colour).

So drawing the conclusion that Hercules was cheap because of the clone market and low production quality may not tell the full story here.😅

Many affordable XT motherboards were made in Taiwan and other Asian places, yet they still did cost a reasonable amount of money.

Edit: Hercules maybe was common in the XT days, but Hercules does really start to shine on an AT class PC, btw.
Say, an early 80386 PC from the mid-late 80s.
Such a PC could better compensate for the slow and taxing 8-Bit i/o that Hercules uses.

Especially if such a PC's system memory i/o is accessible through a proprietary 32-Bit frontside bus rather than ISA.

Or under control by a chipset (which has a separate ISA bridge).
Which also is true for later 286 PCs (NEAT, Headland HT12, G2 etc).

Such a setup would be fine for AutoCAD or a PCB design software. 🙂

Here's a '92 segment of The Computer Chronicles in which a PC expert installs a Hercules card in a 16 MHz 386 PC. Ca. at 09:00 min. Just to prove I'm not making things up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5_doCwi608&t=530

Edit: This may seem ridiculous outdated for the day,
but most business software still supported Hercules just fine. Many games, too.The monitors were still around, too.

SIMCGA and other CGA simulators ran snappy under the wings of a 286/386, as well.

So all in all Hercules still made sense for editoral staff, writers, programmers, database buffs or the aforementioned CAD people.
BBSes and other communication programs were fine with Hercules, too.

The turn was roughly in 1993, I think, when 32-Bit DOS Extender games and multimedia started to take off.
By that point, the 286 processor and the Hercules were slowly being phased out or nolonger being invested in.
That's roughly when CD-ROMs got mainstream, too. And Photo CD, CD-i/Video CD etc. Roughly, I mean. It was different for each country, I suppose. 🤷‍♂️

Edit: I mean, I bought my last PAL NES game (not SNES) in 1996.. 1996!
In a real department store, new, in original packaging (sealed). In the video game area, next to SNES and N64 games.
Lucking back it seems somewhat surreal, but it's true. 🤷‍♂️

Grzyb wrote on 2023-12-29, 22:20:

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-12-29, 18:45:

What's about the aspect ratio of hercules? seems that lot's of games tend to be "extreme widescreen" in hercules mode on a real hercules crt-monitor?

I guess you mean that a lot of games use the 640x200 CGA emulation mode, instead of the native 720x348:
Re: CGA/MDA/HGC test program

ah thank you!

we should really make a new thread with native hercules games that use the full resolution and do not use internal cga emulation.

I downloaded the gfx from the web. because they were created monochrome they are very detailed and much better then coverted stuff with more colors in the original image. I cant resize them because I will lose lot's of details. It would be possible to cutout some parts in order to fit the width and or hight.

Most are 720x576... I'm wondering what hardware were they created for?
Some Macintosh?

Definitely not Hercules, and probably not a PC card at all.

I don't know where I got them from...some kind of artist website.

There are limits of my mce-adapter solution with nec-tft (71vm or 1970nxp), the C64 Emulator for hercules 8088 does not work and games that use internal cga-emultion tend to have problems on the tft (out of range, perhaps 18khz 60hz and not 50hz)...but that is not a problem, because I can always switch the mc2-adapter to cga and change the bios-settings of the euro-pc.

Grzyb wrote on 2024-01-03, 17:06:

Most are 720x576... I'm wondering what hardware were they created for?
Some Macintosh?

Definitely not Hercules, and probably not a PC card at all.

720x576 is one of the digital PAL resolutions.
Amiga supports it as double hi-res, it seems.

It could be that a painting program supported a larger viewport and scrolling.
Someone could have used Paintbrush under MS Windows, for example. Then converted it to GIF.

GIF was very popular for these kind of drawings, have some EGA drawings found on shareware CDs here.
Edit: On a second thought, maybe the resolution isn't hardware related but just reasonable. So never mind.

There two specialized GIF viewers for DOS and CGA/Hercules. Hercview and Grey.
Hercview has scrolling/reloading and zoom and can handle bigger pictures, too.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-01-03, 16:36:

we should really make a new thread with native hercules games that use the full resolution and do not use internal cga emulation.

You can create such a thread yourself!
Meanwhile, I'm going to elaborate on the game that's probably the most popular in that category:

Blockout

It got created in 1989 in Poland, which was already a miracle!
It was still the Cold War era, the entire Eastern Bloc was isolated from the West, and computers were very hard to afford.
For games, there were 8-bit machines: ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64 - but nobody was thinking about a PC for that purpose.

But it somehow did happen: a group of programmers in Poland got in touch with a publisher in the USA, and released several games, for various platforms - including the IBM PC.
And among them, there was Blockout - not only providing great gameplay, but also very interesting from technical point of view.

Here, I'm about to focus on one aspect: exemplary handling of various video modes.

As we all know, vast majority of games is best played on the latest hardware available when a given game was released.
Games from the CGA era were made to use CGA to the max, and often look very good indeed.
In the EGA/VGA era, there was still plenty of titles also supporting CGA, but with minimum effort - such games typically look awful in the 4-color mode.
And in the Hercules era... no, there wasn't Hercules era in gaming, so don't expect anything good here 😜

But there's this exception...

First, note the two EGA options - the most basic configuration (64 KB of video RAM and/or CGA monitor) is also supported to the max!

Various cards are supported at various resolutions, and there are SEPARATE graphics data sets for each of them:

There are also three carefully-designed color palettes:
- solid colors for 16-color modes
- simple 4-color patterns for the 4-color mode
- intricate monochrome patterns for the monochrome mode - and note the light-dark-light-dark... alternation!

And finally, Blockout makes use of one hardly ever used feature of Hercules: DOUBLE BUFFERING.
Programming animated graphics in the native Hercules mode must be more difficult than in CGA emulation:
720 x 348 x 1bpp = 31320 Bytes
320 x 200 x 2bpp = 16000 Bytes
Availability of two video pages, however, may be helpful here.

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-12-29, 21:24:

Now on Nec 71vm instead of Nec 1970nxp...slighlty more problematic (last lines are always doubled) but hercules is no nice...to me better then CGA.

Anything is better than CGA. 🤣

digger wrote on 2024-01-04, 16:17:

dr.zeissler wrote on 2023-12-29, 21:24:

Now on Nec 71vm instead of Nec 1970nxp...slighlty more problematic (last lines are always doubled) but hercules is no nice...to me better then CGA.

Anything is better than CGA. 🤣

Yup. ^^ The Super CGAs, for example. AT&T/Olivetti in 640x400 mono or Plantronics or Amstrad in 640x200 4c.
Both were useful for GEM and paint programs.

Plantronics was low-res, by comparison, but lowered the need for dithering by having 4 colours (in comparison to CGA's highest resolution in monochrome).

The Colony also supported AT&T mode.
https://www.mobygames.com/game/3489/the-colony/specs/

There's one thing were CGA and MCGA/VGA have an advantage, though.
They can be wired to low-quality 15KHz TVs.
That works wonders against pixelation.

CGA has Composite/RGB compatibility out-of-box, MCGA could fall back to 15 KHz RGB output automatically.
(EGA can do 15 KHz RGB, too, but only for 200 line CGA resolutions.)
VGA's CRTC can be reprogrammed for TV timings.
VGA to RGB/Composite converter boxes do exist, too.

On a low-end monitor, dithering works nice (checker board patterns etc): Some extended CGA colours are possible that way.

Some games or paint programs used specifically arranged colored pixel patterns to simulate more colours, rather than NTSC artifact colours.
(The aforementioned BlockOut may also use compatible patterns [needs to be tested]).

On a non-TTL monitor (SCART TV or comparable), those colours start to shine.
With about an 0.4mm screen mask, the colour blending works nicely. The Commodore 1084 has such a mask, for example. The original PS/2 monitors intended for MCGA have, too.

Likewise, old b/w TVs can have a soft image if being connected to a CGA card's composite output.
Here, checker board patterns may blend together to become an extra gray tone.
The limited 200 line resolution gets more hidden, too, getting away with black scan lines.

An external RF modulator box is maybe required here, unless the TV was modded or has an AV in (camping TVs may have).

Such a setup can be useful for European games that were being designed on a PC with mono CGA.

Here, colour sometimes wasn't available via the RCA/Phono/Cinch connector and some users simply had used a monochrome video monitor instead, like Hercules users did.

It's like with home computers, essentially.
CGA had an 40 columns mode, too, which was home computer-ish.
So using similar video monitors (mono or colour) wasn't too wrong.

Edit: Sorry for the long posting. Please everyone just ignore it and go on. 😅
I've just mentioned things in case you want to experiment with less popular monitor setups a bit.
Since this thread is about mono graphics, it just came to mind. 🤷‍♂️

Edit: Please don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting that you should throw away your high-quality TTL/CGA monitors, of course.
But an additional low-res TV/monitor next to your high-quality monitor is worth a thought, maybe. 12" to 14" CRTs don't take up thst much space.

There was a time I used a 1084 on my euro-pc and tandy 1000 but the lowres mode is driving me nuts...the 640x200 is also a bad.
It was much much better if I connected the hercules monitor...better hires in monochrome then color in lowres....

dr.zeissler wrote on 2024-01-04, 22:41:

There was a time I used a 1084 on my euro-pc and tandy 1000 but the lowres mode is driving me nuts...the 640x200 is also a bad.
It was much much better if I connected the hercules monitor...better hires in monochrome then color in lowres....

That's understandable. With CGA's 4c standard palette in 320x200 there's not much colour to blend. 🙁
Unless game designers got creative and used fine dithering patterns or NTSC artifacts (aka Composite CGA).

Some DOS paint programs used that, like ZSoft Paintbrush 2.0 or Mouse Systems PC Paint 1.0.

The C64 artists did similar tricks, I believe.
They arranged a block of pixels in a way that the pixels of another block nearby matched.
That way, the could overcome hardware limitations. Yeah, it's pretty vague. Not sure to explain it properly. 🤷‍♂️

MCGA/VGA mode 13h has 256c to blend together. If game developers are using them wisely, the results can be astonishing on a blurry CRT (14" CRT TV, Tandy VGM-225, IBM PS/2 Model 8514/8513 etc).

That's why I think it might make sense to have two monitors, depending on the use case.

One with a fine screen mask (~0.2x mm dot pitch; for GUIs, games who benefit from scan lines) and one with a consumer grade screen mask (0.4x mm to 0.5x mm dot pitch).

Whether it's colour or monochrome is up to the user. The hole thing is just a suggestion, after all. Not an order. I just mentioned it, because it came to mind.
(Edit: Mono CRTs have no screen mask as such, of course. But they may have a different focus setting, beam size/"dot" size or sharpness setting.
B/w TVs tend to be more soft than their corresponding video monitors, for example.)

CGA colour games can also look fine in monochrome in 4 shades of gray;
on either type of monitor (true monochrome monitor or colour monitor fed with a mono signal).

Though green and amber monitors have something to them, I think.
They also can be adjusted to have a slight background glowing (not sure if it's healthy though).

Last but not least, TFTs/LCD can be fine for higher resolution graphics, I think.
Having a small CRT as a companion monitor wouldn't hurt, though. 🙂

Edit: Sorry again for the long posting. I'll try to stay more in background again.

Edit: Photos attached. Hope that's okay.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-02, 10:57:

Edit: Hercules maybe was common in the XT days, but Hercules does really start to shine on an AT class PC, btw. Say, an early 8 […]
Show full quote

Edit: Hercules maybe was common in the XT days, but Hercules does really start to shine on an AT class PC, btw.
Say, an early 80386 PC from the mid-late 80s.
Such a PC could better compensate for the slow and taxing 8-Bit i/o that Hercules uses.

Especially if such a PC's system memory i/o is accessible through a proprietary 32-Bit frontside bus rather than ISA.

Or under control by a chipset (which has a separate ISA bridge).
Which also is true for later 286 PCs (NEAT, Headland HT12, G2 etc).

Such a setup would be fine for AutoCAD or a PCB design software. 🙂

I know this YouTube video of MS Flight Simulator 4.0 running on a Pentium III with a Hercules monochrome graphics card has been shared here on Vogons more than once, but it never gets old. 🥰 It gives an idea of how well that card can perform when every other possible system bottleneck is removed.

(That video really should be reuploaded in HD, or someone should make another recording of it on a similar system. The 240p resolution in YouTube really doesn't do it justice.)

Grzyb wrote on 2024-01-04, 09:20:

It got created in 1989 in Poland, which was already a miracle! It was still the Cold War era, the entire Eastern Bloc was isolat […]
Show full quote

It got created in 1989 in Poland, which was already a miracle!
It was still the Cold War era, the entire Eastern Bloc was isolated from the West, and computers were very hard to afford.
For games, there were 8-bit machines: ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64 - but nobody was thinking about a PC for that purpose.

But it somehow did happen: a group of programmers in Poland got in touch with a publisher in the USA, and released several games, for various platforms - including the IBM PC.
And among them, there was Blockout - not only providing great gameplay, but also very interesting from technical point of view.

Wow, I had no idea that Blockout was developed behind the Iron Curtain! 😮 To me, it was already an impressive game in its own right. Both in terms of graphics and sound, considering what that game managed to push out of the internal speaker, even on PC/XT systems. Considering how the original Tetris game was written in the Soviet Union, it's also kind of appropriate.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-05, 06:35:

Edit: Sorry again for the long posting. I'll try to stay more in background again.

Don't hold back on my account! I love all these interesting historic and technical details. 👍🏽

digger wrote on 2024-01-08, 09:32:

I know this YouTube video of MS Flight Simulator 4.0 running on a Pentium III with a Hercules monochrome graphics card has been […]
Show full quote

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-02, 10:57:

Edit: Hercules maybe was common in the XT days, but Hercules does really start to shine on an AT class PC, btw. Say, an early 8 […]
Show full quote

Edit: Hercules maybe was common in the XT days, but Hercules does really start to shine on an AT class PC, btw.
Say, an early 80386 PC from the mid-late 80s.
Such a PC could better compensate for the slow and taxing 8-Bit i/o that Hercules uses.

Especially if such a PC's system memory i/o is accessible through a proprietary 32-Bit frontside bus rather than ISA.

Or under control by a chipset (which has a separate ISA bridge).
Which also is true for later 286 PCs (NEAT, Headland HT12, G2 etc).

Such a setup would be fine for AutoCAD or a PCB design software. 🙂

I know this YouTube video of MS Flight Simulator 4.0 running on a Pentium III with a Hercules monochrome graphics card has been shared here on Vogons more than once, but it never gets old. 🥰 It gives an idea of how well that card can perform when every other possible system bottleneck is removed.

(That video really should be reuploaded in HD, or someone should make another recording of it on a similar system. The 240p resolution in YouTube really doesn't do it justice.)

Grzyb wrote on 2024-01-04, 09:20:

It got created in 1989 in Poland, which was already a miracle! It was still the Cold War era, the entire Eastern Bloc was isolat […]
Show full quote

It got created in 1989 in Poland, which was already a miracle!
It was still the Cold War era, the entire Eastern Bloc was isolated from the West, and computers were very hard to afford.
For games, there were 8-bit machines: ZX Spectrum, Atari, Commodore 64 - but nobody was thinking about a PC for that purpose.

But it somehow did happen: a group of programmers in Poland got in touch with a publisher in the USA, and released several games, for various platforms - including the IBM PC.
And among them, there was Blockout - not only providing great gameplay, but also very interesting from technical point of view.

Wow, I had no idea that Blockout was developed behind the Iron Curtain! 😮 To me, it was already an impressive game in its own right. Both in terms of graphics and sound, considering what that game managed to push out of the internal speaker, even on PC/XT systems. Considering how the original Tetris game was written in the Soviet Union, it's also kind of appropriate.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-01-05, 06:35:

Edit: Sorry again for the long posting. I'll try to stay more in background again.

Don't hold back on my account! I love all these interesting historic and technical details. 👍🏽

Thank you for these kind words! ^^
The XT era is new to me, too and I'm often worried I'm a bit too chatty. 😅 My sister says so, too.

I've attached some pictures for you and the others, it's about PC Paint (CGA). 🙂
The monochrome pictures were taken with a real XT PC with a true CGA card (ancient Hitachi CRTC, even, not just Motorola).

Yes, the FS4 video is a real classic!
I've seen it back when it was "new", though it never gets old!
"Broken Wings" fits nicely to it, too!

In principle, someone could recreate the video using a copy of FS4. I'm just not sure which demo modes were being used (FS has script support I think).

PS: I've taken some more pictures, for you and Grzyb. It's about Blockout on CGA.
Depending on the CRT monitor, the dithering really works. 😄

@OldCat I hope it's okay that I've attached two colour pictures below.
I've just thought it would be good as a little comparison. Blockout was beeing shown earlier in this thread, in Hercules monochrome. So I thought that's okay.
I didn't mean to go off topic, whatsoever. I have a soft spot for monochrome graphics, too, after all. 🙂👍

Edit: I've taken two more pictures in monochrome..