Help needed with OS/2

[Ampera]

My 1994 Ati MACH 64 has 2MB of RAM, works off the PCI bus (at that point brand spanking new) and supports a resolution of 1024x768 @60hz with 8 bit colours. It supports 640x480 8 bit per channel colours, and 800x600 16-bit colours. It's, in my experience, a slightly higher than mid range card. My S3 Trio32 beats it out because with the right display, it can go up to 1280x1024 on the same memory, (just at ~40hz) and on the older (albeit faster in some configurations) VESA Local Bus. The Trio32, however, is a bit of a higher range card, and I think it came out in 1995 (Pretty late for VLB actually)

So at the time, the average mid to high range card could pull those resolutions. Lower spec cards, especially those from cheapie manufacturers like Trident (my graphics card is chewing gum) couldn't handle resolutions much higher than 640x480. The main thing that held most cards down was memory, the size and speed of. 2MB can give you (depending on the card) around 1024x768 to 1280x1024 at varying refresh rates and colours. 1MB could give around 800x600 to 1024x768, depending on the card, with varying refresh rates and colours. You can keep chopping that down, as some cheaper cards only had 512k or even something as small as 256k, where really, only VGA spec resolutions were possible.

I could be wrong on some fronts, I'm sure that only the really lucky even got a MACH 64, never mind an S3 Trio 32, and most people were stuck with Tridents with bugger all in terms of memory, but I do not think that a 640x480 native resolution with decent colours is THAT out of the ordinary.

[tooki]

I don't need to be reminded of what stuff cost then: we've already established that my memory of that era is more accurate than you guys', plus I literally just reviewed a magazine of the era to refresh my memory and make sure I wasn't remembering wrong. (Link is still in my post.)

Computer magazines in that era liked to review just released (or soon to be released) high end systems. Occasionally they would feature low or mid range systems, but generally the focus was on cutting edge.

Nobody is saying resolutions higher than 640x480 weren't available in 1994. They certainly were. What we're saying, and this is the important bit you need to focus on, is that most home users still ran at 640x480, due mainly to cost. Memory was still expensive, so getting a video card and monitor capable of showing 800x600 or 1024x768 @ 16bpp and a refresh rate greater than (or equal to) 60Hz was still very expensive.

It wasn't until Windows 95, the rise in popularity of the Internet and the bottom falling out of the memory industry did screen resolutions start increasing on the average consumer's PC.

You might have a magazine from 1994, but I have actual hard data showing the most used screen resolutions from the early-80's to 2016. VGA resolution was king until 1995/96, when 800x600 started taking over.

Again, just because something was available in 1994, doesn't mean it was economically viable for everyone.

I mean, look at the timeframe. What was there that really required a resolution higher than VGA for the average PC user in 1994? It's not like you could run apps side by side in Windows 3.11. Webpages were just text and a few GIFs. QuickTime and Indigo videos were QVGA resolution due to the processor power required to decode the compression. Consumers weren't editing digital photos back then. Basically, you wrote documents in Word Perfect (or Wors), worked on spreadsheets in Lotus (or Excel), balanced your checkbook with QuickBooks and played games (a lot of which still used DOS for maximum performance and used VGA resolutions, at most).

So yes, in 1994 VGA *was* the highest resolution your average consumer used on a PC.

And I agree with that. What I've been disputing all along is the claim (made by hero999) that VGA resolution was "quite high" for 1994. It wasn't. It was the normal res for most users. The actual high end was higher than VGA.

P.S. I expressly stated that it was the ads in the magazine, not the reviews, that I was looking at. You're right that the reviews tend to look at cutting edge, but the ads in a mainstream magazine like that tended to focus on price. I also provided the link to the magazine in question so you can see for yourself.

P.P.S. Where did you find the screen res data? I was actually looking for that when responding, and couldn't find anything going earlier than 2000.

[tooki]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

[NivagSwerdna]

What I've been disputing all along is the claim (made by hero999) that VGA resolution was "high end" for 1994. It wasn't. It was the normal res for most users. But actual "high end" was higher than VGA.

In 1994 I believe I was using XGA (beyond SVGA).

[Halcyon]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

[Ampera]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

[Halcyon]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

I won't get into a pissing contest over technicalities but VGA was "the shiz", especially when it came to DOS games in the early 90's. Let's not forget that the VGA and SVGA standards were developed in the late 1980's. When Windows 3.x came around, 640x480 was pretty much the standard. If you had a video card, drivers and a monitor that could handle more, then yeah, it supported it, but few applications made use of it.

Programs like Myst and Sim City 2000 SE complained about higher resolutions. Even on video editing machines, 640x480 was about on-par with NTSC and PAL standards.

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

Yes sorry, I was thinking of CIF. Hence the edit. ;-)

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

[tooki]

Lol, when I was about to edit this, you said that 640x480 is better than TV resolution.

NTSC resolution is 720 "pixels" by 486 lines.

PAL is slightly better by being 720 by 576 lines. Both are over TV. You can debate what was used, but those are the standards.

Well, the NTSC and PAL standards specify lines (525 and 625, resp) in the vertical, but not the horizontal resolution as such, since it is variable (a continuous analog signal). Broadcast TV usually managed over 400 horizontal, but VHS super long-play was often less than 250 horizontal!

As you alluded to, the NTSC and PAL standards are designed with overscan in mind: NTSC specifies 483 lines visible, PAL specifies 576 visible.

So while their visible vertical resolution was indeed above VGA, their horizontal resolution was usually far less in practice, due to the broadcast or composite signals normally used to transmit them.

Additionally, their temporal resolution is far worse, thanks to interlacing, at 29.97 frames/59.94 fields for NTSC, 25 frames/50 fields for PAL, vs 60 frames progressive for VGA. And since VGA signals are not composited onto crap cable, it produces far sharper images. In the PAL world, SCART connectors with discrete RGB existed, and reportedly produced vastly sharper images than composite or S-Video connectors. (This was used mostly in game consoles IIRC, but I'm not a gamer so I kinda ignored it. Some DVD players did too, I think.) Later, when HDTV started to come along, component video connections also finally gave NTSC and PAL a decent connection, but it was too late by then.

DVD shows NTSC and PAL at their finest, and indeed could look very good.

All in all, though, Halcyon's corrected claim that VGA and NTSC/PAL are "about on par" is pretty accurate.

Yes sorry, I was thinking of CIF. Hence the edit. ;-)

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

[Ampera]

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

[Zero999]

I didn't miss the color depth, I even addressed it. Your sentence used a subordinate clause stating that 640x480 was high end (the wording is such that the color depth is not a part of the claim). If that's not what you meant, well, it is what you wrote.

I clearly said 640x480 and 8-bit colour in the same sentence. Even if the meaning was a little ambiguous, it's crystal clear what I meant now, so please stop misquoting me.

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.

Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

[Naguissa]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Halcyon]

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

Of course it was flickery! 50hz vs 60hz mains. NTSC looked horrible in Australia et. al.

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

You may have been first, we improved. ;-)

How's your metric system going?

[Ampera]

Besides, everyone knows that PAL was "better" ;-) NTSC = Never The Same Colour (Color)

Heheheh yeah. But at least NTSC's frame rate wasn't visibly flickery to me, which standard PAL absolutely was!

Of course it was flickery! 50hz vs 60hz mains. NTSC looked horrible in Australia et. al.

We made NTSC first, you just copied us and did it better. We pioneer, Europeans steal. 

You may have been first, we improved. ;-)

How's your metric system going?

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

[Halcyon]

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

Really?

1/2 litre?! Our "standard" size bottles you keep in the fridge are 1.25L and the "large" ones are 2L. "Single serves" are 600mL which I disagree with... too much sugar.

Milk here is generally in 1L and 2L bottles.

EDIT: Photo of beverages.

[Zero999]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

Where? At work yes, but certainly not for the average home user.

Just look at the minimum requirements for software back then. How many titles mandated a minimum greater resolution/colour depth than what a VGA card could provide? Games were mostly DOS and ran in 320x200 8-bit colour and Windows titles would still run on 640x480 4-bit colour. There might have been some high end CAD and image editing software which required greater resolutions and colour depths but that was the exception.

[free_electron]

i had a Number-Nine systems Graphics card that could do 1600x1200 hooked up to a Nokia 445x 21 inch monitor. running windows 3.1. worked perfectly fine.

Number Nine Systems GXE 64 Pro  : http://www.ebay.com/itm/NUMBER-NINE-9-GXE64-PRO-PCI-GRAPHICS-CARD-S3-VISION964-WITH-WARRANTY-/232389290988. it has 4Megabyte VRAM. more than my main memory

[Naguissa]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.  Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

But in '94 the common standard was SVGA...

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

Where? At work yes, but certainly not for the average home user.

Just look at the minimum requirements for software back then. How many titles mandated a minimum greater resolution/colour depth than what a VGA card could provide? Games were mostly DOS and ran in 320x200 8-bit colour and Windows titles would still run on 640x480 4-bit colour. There might have been some high end CAD and image editing software which required greater resolutions and colour depths but that was the exception.

Software was limited due processor power and lack of acceleration, but hardware supported lot more of modes. My PC was able of 1280x1024@256colors, my monitor (cheap unbranded one) only 1024x768i... But friends PCs were similar.

Enviado desde mi Jolla mediante Tapatalk

[Ampera]

Good, we use it on a daily basis, while we have a customary system used for basic household tasks that nobody needs to do complicated maths on. Our 1/2 litre soda bottles are great, and gallon milk jugs are awesome too.

It would be neat to have a cleaner, softer system to use without all the SI complications for common tasks. It feels a bit homelier to say a gallon of milk instead of four litres. (rough conversion)

Really?

1/2 litre?! Our "standard" size bottles you keep in the fridge are 1.25L and the "large" ones are 2L. "Single serves" are 600mL which I disagree with... too much sugar.

Milk here is generally in 1L and 2L bottles.

EDIT: Photo of beverages.

I'm a moron.

The / was meant to be an or.

1-2 litre soda bottles are what I meant.

[skarecrow]

i had a Number-Nine systems Graphics card that could do 1600x1200 hooked up to a Nokia 445x 21 inch monitor. running windows 3.1. worked perfectly fine.

Number Nine Systems GXE 64 Pro  : http://www.ebay.com/itm/NUMBER-NINE-9-GXE64-PRO-PCI-GRAPHICS-CARD-S3-VISION964-WITH-WARRANTY-/232389290988. it has 4Megabyte VRAM. more than my main memory

Wow, do those still exist? Number9 cards were THE card to get back in the day. All of my friends who were into computers wanted one, but none of us could afford them.

Late 1993 or early 1994 is probably about when I sold my ALR FlexCache 386DX20 system with 5mb ram and built a 386DX40 system (AMD chip, of course) with 8mb ram and the cheapest video card I could find that did 1024x768 (I'm thinking it was a Trident). My next video card upgrade would bring me to 1280x1024 which was well beyond the specs for my NEC Multisync II monitor, but it still worked fine with Windbloze 95. Yes, I ran Win95 beta back in 94. I believe it was known as Chicago Windows back then. Was like 23 floppies.

After running such "high" resolutions on my machine at home I couldn't even LOOK at a computer running 640x480. I know I changed all of the computers at school to at LEAST 800x600. I actually got paid by my school to cut class whenever they had computer work that needed to be done. I used to teach all the office workers how to use software that I'd never even heard of before. Ahh, those were the days.

But back to the OP topic. I always wanted to run OS/2 (wait a sec, wouldn't OS/2 be HALF an OS? ;-D) but never really got the chance. I did buy a copy of Warp 4 at a computer show once, but returned it the next day because it was a time bombed Alpha release that already expired. One of the posters comments made me glad I never used it though. All of the "positives" they said about it are the main reasons I hate Apple, so if that post is true I would have absolutely hated OS/2 because IMHO there's nothing worse than Apple.

Sent from my XT1565 using Tapatalk

[timb]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

Go back and re-read my posts, please. I never said 640x480 was uncommon! In fact, I have been saying it was the *most common* resolution in use in 1994!

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

Again, this was a time when the average consumer bought new, low-end machines *or* used machines.

Also, keep in mind there are three factors when considering video quality of that era.

1) Screen Resolution (640x480, 800x600, etc.)
2) Color Depth (16, 256, Millions, etc. *or* 4bpp, 8bpp, 16bpp, etc.)
3) Refresh Rate (50/60Hz being the bare acceptable minimum, with 75Hz or higher being ideal.)

Your video card and monitor might support an 800x600 resolution, but only at 16 colors due to memory or bus limitations with the video card, then the monitor might only support that resolution at 60Hz, which would give you a headache after awhile due to the perceptible flicker.

There were a lot of factors that limited what resolutions you could use, however, pretty much every system, from low end to high end, supported 640x480@256 Colors.

[timb]

P.P.S. Where did you find the screen res data? I was actually looking for that when responding, and couldn't find anything going earlier than 2000.

I saw it a few months back, possibly on the Something Awful forums. There was a similar discussion about the timeline and evolution of video standards, so someone took raw data from various sources and made a nice little spreadsheet with graphs and stuff. I'm hoping I saved a copy of it; I'll check tonight.

[tooki]

I didn't miss the color depth, I even addressed it. Your sentence used a subordinate clause stating that 640x480 was high end (the wording is such that the color depth is not a part of the claim). If that's not what you meant, well, it is what you wrote.

I clearly said 640x480 and 8-bit colour in the same sentence. Even if the meaning was a little ambiguous, it's crystal clear what I meant now, so please stop misquoting me.

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

We didn't say that. You misunderstood. I thought I'd cleared it up in my previous post.

Yes, VGA cards were very common in 1994. No one denied that. We said that 640x480 8-bit or greater colour depth was uncommon. Note that 640x480 8-bit is not a VGA graphics mode! Please don't imply that it is. The old VGA cards didn't have enough memory to display any more than 16 colours, at a time at that resolution. The monitors at the time were analogue and therefore could display a theoretically unlimited number of colours but the graphics cards could not.

The VGA card only had 256KB of RAM. It could stretch to higher resolutions than 640x480 but not with a standard monitor. It was possible to play around with the registers, in a similar manner to mode X, to get 800x600 4-bit but the refresh rate was low and it wouldn't work with a standard VGA monitor, so it wasn't used much. Mode X could also give 400x600 resolution (800x600 as far as the monitor was concerned because the video card displayed each horizontal pixed twice) with 256 colours but again, it wouldn't work with a standard monitor, so 360x480 was as high as you could safely go.

One of the problems was that Windows 3.1 wouldn't work with resolutions less than EGA 640x350, so 8-bit colour was out of the question with a standard VGA card. There would have been enough memory for 640x350 or even 640x400, but the VGA card wouldn't permit it as the horizontal resolution was halved in 8-bit mode.

Even if (for the sake of argument) I accepted that when you said "resolution", you meant the entire mode (640x480 at 8 bit) and not just the resolution (dimension in pixels), the claim that 640x480@8bit was rare for 1994 still remains wrong. By 1994, the transition to higher resolutions and bit depths was already underway, even in affordable systems. The main limitation was CPU speed, in that giving the CPU more pixels to render could easily bog it down. Accelerated video cards (first for 2D, then for 3D) were invented to alleviate this, and eventually became commonplace.

[tooki]

640x480 at either 16 or 256 colours was pretty much "the default" for Windows machines in the early 90's, even on relatively mediocre hardware.

Once people installed Windows 9x, it was 800x600 or 1024x768 for higher spec'd machines and monitors.

Thank you. I don't understand why timb and hero999 seem to think VGA resolution was uncommon then, even on modest systems.

Go back and re-read my posts, please. I never said 640x480 was uncommon! In fact, I have been saying it was the *most common* resolution in use in 1994!

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

Again, this was a time when the average consumer bought new, low-end machines *or* used machines.

Also, keep in mind there are three factors when considering video quality of that era.

1) Screen Resolution (640x480, 800x600, etc.)
2) Color Depth (16, 256, Millions, etc. *or* 4bpp, 8bpp, 16bpp, etc.)
3) Refresh Rate (50/60Hz being the bare acceptable minimum, with 75Hz or higher being ideal.)

Your video card and monitor might support an 800x600 resolution, but only at 16 colors due to memory or bus limitations with the video card, then the monitor might only support that resolution at 60Hz, which would give you a headache after awhile due to the perceptible flicker.

There were a lot of factors that limited what resolutions you could use, however, pretty much every system, from low end to high end, supported 640x480@256 Colors.

I apologize, I seemingly did misread something you said, cuz yeah, you have been agreeing that 640x480@8bit was the standard. Sorry about that.

[helius]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

[Zero999]

SVGA and XGA were available but relegated to expensive high end systems then (a video card and suitable monitor for those resolutions would have been expensive in 1994). You'd also need a PC with a PCI bus (which essentially meant you had a cutting edge Pentium) or VESA bus (which meant a high end 486) in order to support that video card. (Higher resolutions and color depth required more throughout than ISA could provide).

The claim about bus throughput was repeated here before... it's simply wrong. No PC refreshes its video output over the bus, they are not Apple ][s in disguise.
By 1992, video cards supporting 1024x768 at 256 colors were affordable. They could be purchased for less than $150 with 1MB of VRAM as a 16-bit ISA card. A 15" monitor capable of displaying that resolution cost $400-700 depending on brand. The PCI bus wouldn't be released for two more years.
Other components like CPU and RAM were the primary contributors to cost.

You've forgotten inflation. Those figures would be around double that in today's money. I'm glad you could afford it, but my family couldn't.