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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: Did EGA Save PC Gaming?
Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 16:17:53 -0400
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On Mon, 22 Jul 2024 10:47:25 +0200, "Werner P." <werpu@gmx.at> wrote:

>Am 21.07.24 um 20:10 schrieb Spalls Hurgenson:
>> 
>> That's the thesis of a recent article*, anyway. I'm not sure I agree
>> with it but it's a good excuse for a ramble about old-timey games and
>> hardware.
>> 
>> Not that I need much an excuse to do that.
>> 
>
>In fairness, PC gaming followed more or less graphically in the 80s the 
>general trend of what was possible.
>Before EGA there was TGA which basically was derived from the PC juniors 
>graphics capabilities. (Tandy Grahics and sound)
>CGA was designed at a time when the only computer with decent graphics 
>were the 8 bit ataris, but after that it basically followed the usual 
>route and basically surpassed the amiga with VGA. EGA was an 
>intermediate step VGA in my opinion was the more important step however 
>because it catapulted the PC into the front of graphical capaibilites of 
>buyable systems.
>

Indeed, in some ways, when released the original IBM/PCs were actually
quite ahead of the curve. They tended to have more RAM, and more
storage, and monochrome MDA was /amazingly/ sharp. And while in some
aspects the 4MHz 8086 chip was slower than the 65xx 1MHz processors
used by its many competitors (usually straight forward calculations)
in other aspects it blew them away. 

Its visuals and sound capabilities, on initial release, weren't ever
/great/ (except maybe for its monochrome text mode, which was
excellent) but neither was it terrible when compared to its
competitors. 

But I think one of the PC's greatest strengths was also its biggest
weaknesses: mainly, it's incredible backward compatibility. Many apps
written in the era of the 386 and 486 could still run on original PCs
(albeit at a significant performance hit), and vice versa. That meant
people might play a game written in the 1983 on a computer built in
1994, and the primitive graphics and sound would give them a
completely wrong impression about the machine's capabilities. 

It also meant that a lot of developers were programming for the
lowest-common denominator in order to maximize profits.  The first
SVGA card came out only a year after the Amiga, but almost nobody
owned one for years afterwards. So SVGA games were rare as hens' teeth
until the mid 90s, which led people to believe that the platform
itself was incapable of high color/resolution combinations.

>Btw. the CGA eyesore stemmed more from the colors used than from the 
>limited set of colours on the other hand it was better than the Apple II 
>and early Tandy and commodore machines but when it came out it almost 
>was bottom of the barrel of what was possible.

More, the 4 color limitation was only if you used the 320x200
resolution. At 160x100, you had full 16 color support. Sure, it was
much blockier, but in 1981 it wasn't THAT much different from what its
competitors were using. Pretty much every second-generation console
(Atari 2600, Intellivision, ColecoVision, Odyssey) used a similar
resolution and color depth.

There were also numerous hacky methods of getting more colors at
higher resolutions too (IIRC, one technique was to swapping the
palette during the electron gun sweep between lines), although these
were tricky to pull off, especially since you weren't guaranteed 100%
compatibility between different PCs because they all used different
components and were built by different manufacturers. A lot of those
techniques needed nano-second accurate timings, and the variation
between chipsets was often enough to make it so any hack would only
work on a very specific set of hardware...

(the demoscene loved such trickery but boy-oh-boy, getting some of
their demos to run was very hit or miss unless you had just the right
video card).

>IBM thought very likely not about games at all or thought that if 
>someone was playing on a PC it they should use the composite mode (home 
>computer thinking that you hook your computer to the TV for playing 
>games) and the composite mode was rather high end for 1980/82 with its 
>possible 16 colors. Problem was no one hooked their PCs to the tv and 
>there was only a handful of games using it.

I think that if, for whatever reason, EGA (or Tandy, or IBM's MCGA)
hadn't come about so quickly, composite CGA would have become more
popular. It remained niche because it was quickly rendered
unnecessary.

Like you said, IBM designed the original PC thinking it would mainly
be used by business users, and many of its capabilities reflect this
thinking. Still, even if PC games weren't as flashy as you might see
on the C64 or Apple IIe, there /was/ a robust gaming scene on the
platform. Many games leveraged the hardware's more robust memory and
storage to its advantage, allowing more robust and complicated worlds.
There's a significant difference between Sublogic/Microsoft's Flight
Simulator 1.0 on the Apple and the IBM PC; the latter offers
significantly smoother flight and more impressive visuals. Strategy
games could manipulate more variables and offer larger worlds. Chess
games loved the beefier processors on the PC. 

EGA didn't save PC gaming. It just made it better.