Difference between revisions of "Enhanced Graphics Adapter"

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(Games)
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Loom - DOS - Screenshot - Dye Room.png|[[Loom]]
 
Loom - DOS - Screenshot - Dye Room.png|[[Loom]]
 
Secret of Monkey Island, The - DOS - Screenshot - Island Cannon.png|[[The Secret of Monkey Island]]
 
Secret of Monkey Island, The - DOS - Screenshot - Island Cannon.png|[[The Secret of Monkey Island]]
.png|[[SimAnt]]
+
SimAnt - DOS - Screenshot - EGA.png|[[SimAnt]]
 
Space Quest II - DOS - Screenshot - Asteroid Base.png|[[Space Quest II: Volhaul's Revenge]]
 
Space Quest II - DOS - Screenshot - Asteroid Base.png|[[Space Quest II: Volhaul's Revenge]]
 
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Revision as of 16:43, 16 January 2018

An IBM EGA card.

The Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) is a piece of hardware which gives IBM personal computers color graphics capabilities superior to those from the earlier Color Graphics Adapter. It was designed and developed by IBM and first sold in 1984, but competing companies quickly reverse-engineered it and sold clones. It was superseded in 1987 by the Video Graphics Array (VGA) which added superior color graphic capabilities, although software continued to support it for years to follow.

EGA supports four graphics modes and four text modes. Its best graphic resolution is 640x350 with 4-bit color (16 distinct colors at once, chosen from a palette of 60 colors), but most programs which supported EGA used its more primitive 320x200 resolution and didn't modify the default color palette. The display type was extremely popular for DOS programs through the mid to late 1980s.

I spent a lot of my childhood acquainted with EGA graphics, not just because a lot of games I played used it, but because it was a very popular QuickBASIC screen (screen 7). Even though I haven't bothered with it in decades, I still have the default EGA color palette memorized.

Games

All games that used 4-bit Color

These are games that I think made good use of EGA graphics:

Documentation

Links