2 Mar
2016
2 Mar
'16
10:45 a.m.
> I've tried it on a number of machines (from
the 386 era to a modern PC)
> and they all just end up showing garbage when this mode is enabled. I
> cannot for the life of me find a reference to this mode existing
> anywhere, but I assume it must have worked on *some* SVGA chipset of the
> era since ID programmed in support for it. I'm guessing it was cut
> because nothing else supported it (and because 160x200 must have looked
> awful, even with lots of colors...)
VGA has analog RGB signals.
VGA card uses DAC chip, 8 bit would give the 256 color and 16 bit would
give the 65536, and 24 bit would give the 16.7 million color depth. RAM
was a big issue as well on these cards, since more memory needed to store
color info.
The one thing I would wonder is -- even if some video card had the ability
to sacrifice resolution for color depth (reconfigurable RAMDAC?) -- were
the textures and tiles in Doom supplied in true color/16 bit color or were
they 256 colors?
--
Ethan O'Toole