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

[Stephen Kitt]

On Wed, 2 Mar 2016 02:05:56 -0600, Ryan Eisworth <ryan at diskfutility.com>
wrote:
[...]
> On another note… a while back I read an article that said John Carmack (one
> of the Doom developers) is wrote Quake on a 28-inch 16:9 CRT made by
> Silicon Graphics/Intergraph that was capable of running at 2042x1152. See:
> <http://www.geek.com/games/john-carmack-coded-quake-on-a-28-inch-169-1080p-monitor-in-1995-1422971/>
> 
> The workstation next to the pictured monitor appears to be also by
> SGI/Intergraph, and looks similar to the Interserve 80, though the Pentium
> II was not out yet in 1995 so it is likely an older model:
> <http://www.ceu-inc.com/intergr_1d.html>
> 
> I’ve often wondered about computational power might be in that unit in
> mid/early 1995. The Pentium Pro had not been released yet, and I know
> Intergraph shipped multiprocessor Pentium Pro workstations, but prior to
> that if it is an x86-based machine, I don’t think it could have been faster
> than the 200 MHz P54CS.

Intergraph shipped multi-processor Pentium workstations in 1994 and 1995
(the TD-4 at least); the fastest Pentium available in 1995 was the 133MHz
P54CS. The March 1995 issue of Byte has a review of the Intergraph TD-4, and
http://www.ceu-inc.com/intergr_6d.html mentions that the 28" monitor was
intended to be used with the TD or TDZ workstations.

Back then of course the fastest workstations used Alphas...

Regards,

Stephen