Random VGA question: 160x200 "high color" mode?

ethan at 757.org ethan at 757.org
Wed Mar 2 12:45:15 CST 2016


>> 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



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