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Comment by moosedev | Hacker News Reader

The (rushed) original floppy release was 320x200 only. The (much better) CD-ROM version released later in 1994 supported 320x200, 320x400, 640x400, and 640x480. (Although good luck playing at the higher resolutions on typical machines of the time :-)

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I played the CD-ROM version on an IBM PS/1000 with a "Blue Lightning" CPU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_386SLC#IBM_486BL_(Blue_Lig...) which was a "486SX3" 25/75 MHz - IIRC it did manage the higher resolutions, but the framerate got very choppy when there was a lot going on...

yes, i just went and fired up my cd rom version and 640x480 was the highest resolution. i am not sure when 800x600 became common in games. warcraft 2 was the other very famous 640x480 IIRC.

I think 800x600 only started to become common around the time 3D accelerators became a thing. Some 2D games may have had 800x600 or 1024x768 a bit earlier but doing higher than 640x480 in a detailed 3D game would really have pushed it without 3D acceleration with the CPU power available at the time.

IIRC Descent II (1997) allowed 800x600 and maybe higher even without a 3D accelerator, but you'd have needed a fairly powerful PC for running that. I'd kind of like to assume Quake would also have supported higher resolutions but I honestly can't remember.

By 1998 or 1999 so, when 3D acceleration was becoming more common, higher resolutions also started gaining more ground in 3D games.

Even after that, many 2D games (including the original StarCraft, I think) were still only 640x480, probably in order to avoid scaling issues with multiple resolutions.

Another problem was the lack of standards at the time. The standard VGA was 640x480 in 16 colors, anything above that you had to program the specific VGA chipset directly.

Then there was VESA, which was standard for high-res, but slow.

Then Windows 95 came and with it came drivers and DirectX, and the driver wars moved on to 3D accelerator territory...

I hadn't thought of the state of standards, but that's also true.

However, mid-90's games that did do 640x480 generally did that in 256 colours, so they already had to deal with going above standard VGA one way or another. Very few games that I can think of used the VGA mode of 640x480 in 16 colours, and they certainly weren't first-person shooters.

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