Homebrew Hercules Graphics Card

My first PC computer came with Hercules card! Awesome resolution, but barely can play most of the games. So I hacked one game https://www.mobygames.com/game/6522/trolls/ to run on it.

Here is what it involved, although it was barely playable. I've found where the game references the 0xA0000 addresss - e.g. the VGA 320x200, then I wrote a stupid TSR program, and had to hack in few places the game to refer to a buffer I had in my TSR (it was at fixed address, so it was easier). Then on every interrupt (I can't remember exactly what), it'll read the pixels and transforms then (well in a shitty way, that somehow made pixels work - how that last bit worked without even caring about the palette I don't know - maybe I was lucky). It was fun experiment, and it worked, but maybe 8-10fps or something like this...

The Hercules card was the first widely popular non-IBM standard for the IBM PC. It got as much mainstream software support as IBM's own CGA or EGA (and far more than Plantronics, or IBM's PGC). Business software like Lotus and Harvard Graphics, and games like Microsoft Flight Simulator and SimCity, support Hercules. (Flight Simulator's support for Hercules singlehandedly turned many 1980s PCs into gaming machines.)

The ultimate proof of the Hercules standard's power is that everyone else cloned it, whether in discrete video cards or in motherboards with integrated video. I guess this video is evidence that the Hercules standard is so simple that someone today can implement it at home. I suppose that's why Hercules, the company, couldn't maintain its market lead after the EGA era; the same thing happened to Hayes modems.

Oh, wow. That takes me back to my first PC, an Amstrad PC1512 (dual 5¼"), which came with CGA and B/W monitor.

I tricked that baby out with additional RAM (640 kB really was enough for most people), a 32 MB HD on an ISA card, and, importantly in this context, a Hercules card. The latter was switchable, so you still could run CGA games, while enjoying the crisp text and line graphics of Hercules.

This takes me back. My first PC was a decommissioned CAD. It was a WYSE branded AT compatible with a passive-mainboard (i.e. the mainboard was just the bus, and the CPU was on a carrier that plugged into the bus), and an HGA connected to an amber display.

As an aside, the Sierra adventure games supported HGA, but many of them were designed for color, making certain puzzles rather difficult to solve.

Hercules is an odd pick for a vintage board recreation. Did the original card have anything that made it particularly special or interesting?

Hercules Plus supported changing the text font without burning a ROM. As someone who never liked the original IBM PC font, that would have been a welcome feature before it came to EGA/VGA.