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Comment by joakleaf | Hacker News Reader

Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option.

The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486.

In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU.

I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.

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I distinctly remember playing it with a buddy of mine in LAN in its first days. He had a 486DX4 at 100MHz, I think, and I a Pentium 75. He could play a lot of other games better, raw speed I guess, but he really struggled with Quake. It worked, but with a lot worse performance than on my Pentium.

I remember playing Red Alert on my 486 at the time. It was enjoyable game but something seemed a bit off.

About 3 months later I upgraded to a Pentium 200 and realizing that I'd been playing at 1/3rd speed because the 486 just couldn't handle it. Red Alert become much more fun after that.

haha, had exactly the same experience with the first GTA.

I loved the VESA modes, all kinds of odd things like 360 pixels wide, and a personal favorite - 512x384, which was as much as my P100 could push and still be playable

> Quake was build for 320x200 (VGA) as primary resolution target.

Wasn't it Mode X, i.e. 320x240?

    vid_describemodes

    Lists all available video modes, built-in and VESA.

    vid_mode #

    Switches the video mode to mode #.  Quake has 11 built-in modes:

    0:  320x200
    1:  320x200
    2:  360x200
    3:  320x240
    4:  360x240
    5:  320x350
    6:  360x350
    7:  320x400
    8:  360x400
    9:  320x480
    10: 360x480

    0 is the default mode.  Modes above 10 are not built in, but are VESA
    modes which may be supported by Quake and your hardware.  Use
    vid_describemodes to see the available VESA modes.

I was always super disappointed they didn't use Mode-X by default.

As a result, even though you could set Mode-X explicitly, it wasn't optimized so it went slower than plain 13h and wasn't even page-flipped. So there wasn't a compelling reason to use it, except for the square pixels.

Ah, good old Mode X hackery; all that effort for 40 extra scanlines (and paging).

VGA was 640x480, not 320x200. 320x200 didn't have an acronym I can recall. SVGA was 800x600.

256 color VGA mode 13h was certainly 320x200.

I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions.

The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode.

640x480 was 16 color.

Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels.

SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.

Time for some HN-worthy pedantry. I distinctly remember reading in DOS for Dummies that VGA stood for Video Graphics Array. Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.

Yes, sorry... You are absolutely right!

I've always mixed up "Array" and "Adapter" for VGA, as EGA stood for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and CGA was Color Graphics Adapter.

320x200x256 colors was referred to as MCGA, but nobody actually had an an MCGA card.

Anyone who had a PS/2 Model 25 or 30 did, but those weren't exactly popular, and MCGA was a weird duck (supporting the 256 color 320x200 mode, and a 640x480 monochrome mode, but not the 320x200x16 EGA mode -- which VGA supported -- which made it not a compatible upgrade from EGA and unable to run lots of EGA software. If it had been EGA compatible, it might have seen more use, even though VGA was better and introduced at the same time.)

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