Video on EGA

Installed one of those combo VGA and EGA cards, hooked up an EGA monitor, set the card to EGA mode, and loaded Windows 95 (It's in my Pentium III computer, last computer I have that has ISA slots). Running an OS X theme too...

I was shocked to see that it could play YouTube! Though it looked like complete crap.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ibm
• ega
• isa
• pc
• pentium
• you
• tube
• 3rd
• rock
• from
• the
• sun
• monitor
• ttl
• rgb
• digital
• 16
• colors

[macdeath69]

Is this EGA 640x350x16/64 or the infamous 320x200x16/16 ?

the 320x200 EGA was limited to CGA's palette only... while the 640x350 had actually access to the 64 colours palette (16 per screen, but possinble raster colour changes or Demo like tricks...) and could perform neat ditherings....

Ideal solution would be a re-coded video to manage some palette colour changes so you may not be limited to the desktop's palette.

Also the video should run in fullscreen/or with only a black border.

[hakemon]

@macdeath69 It was 640x350, but Windows only could use it as 16 colors.

[SkyCharger001]

I'd expect that you'd only be able to see 1/4th of the actual image, or is the EGA/VGA distinction limited to the display driving method?

MODE, DRIVE-SIGNAL

EGA = digital, 2 bits per component

VGA= Analog, 64 or 256 gradations per component.

[hakemon]

I believe it's limited to driving method and VRAM..

as you point out, EGA isn't an analog signal, it's TTL digital.

[mrfuck792]

hmm.... nejnovější grafická karta na světě...

[macdeath69]

try the following youtube video : _9S8DvimBdo

this may interest you to see what a poor 8bit system (Amlstrad CPC in 320x200x4 mode) could do too.

[TahreyUK]

@macdeath69 Also I remember Encarta 94 (93? 95?) on an old 386SX at school, with an external SCSI caddy-load 1x speed CDROM, VGA and no sound card. Multimedia genesis .... it had videos. Which would play in ugly-as-sin poorly-dithered 16 colour mode at postage stamp size, or slightly less ugly poorly-dithered 256 colour 320x200 mode full screen!

Maybe that'd be the kind of thing to aim for? But with a better dithering algorithm, so it doesn't end up even making butterflies look awful?

[TahreyUK]

@macdeath69 It'd be a cool hack, to be sure... but a bit pointless. Especially with the poor resolution.

I think I saw a demo once that claimed to give 720x700 resolution or something similarly silly and all 64 colours at once on full-RAM cards, by hacking registers, palette switching and updating bang on the VBlank so as not to need a buffer. Can't see that playing nice with decoding video! But the patterns it drew did look pretty, even on our 2Mb SVGA card.

[TahreyUK]

Think I remember doing this once whilst playing about with Win 95...Found it still had an EGA driver on the list (...or was it the Win 3.1 one, which it somehow still supported after I copied it across?). Set it up, with my PCI 3D graphics card ... it worked! Then soon got bored and switched back.

(Also there were enough monitor-tweak apps that could do anything from 160x100 thru 640x350 and out the other side - in truecolour!)

Impressed by the speed though - even VGA-16 usually crawls, on PCI!

[TahreyUK]

@SkyCharger001 Why would that make 3/4 of the image disappear? All I'd personally expect to happen is that you get 130 less lines of vertical resolution (350 vs 480) and maybe a slightly different 16-colour palette than the regular Windows VGA-16 one...

BTW VGA proper is 64 gradations per component. True colour is a post-SVGA (VESA?) addition. Even highcolour only had 32 or 32/64/32 gradations. The connection standard, however, is analogue, so it could theoretically handle INFINITE colour depth

[macdeath69]

@hakemon

Of course, EGA is a 16 colour mode max...

You have to use some Hardware tricks.. probably in assembly langage... in order to get more than 16 colours on screen...

So you would have to write your own web browser or Flash reader... in order to get it manage EGA properly (with rasters colour changes/interrupts per exemple)

[TroutButter]

3rd rock!!! :D