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Comment by mdip | Hacker News Reader

If memory serves, I had a neighbor who bought that 4MB Emulex card.

It was for an 80286 clone that had a 10MB HDD. His rational for buying this card was "I can make a big RAM drive out of it and run everything from memory"

I can't recall the price of the thing, but I want to say it ran in the thousands. Couldn't run most games on it because of copy protection so we never got to take advantage of it. In fact, I don't think the extra memory was usable at all in most software -- I recall we couldn't run a game on his machine due to having 512MB of onboard memory, but it had no issue in my ancient 8088 with 640K installed (in bizarre CGA colors).

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CGA was the worst. EGA and VGA were huge improvements because CGA only had 4 ugly colors, while EGA had 16 (good), and VGA had 256 (much better). VGA also supported pallets I think (a way of allowing an application to use 256 colors out of 16 million supported colors).

Nitpick: the VGA DAC has 6 bits per RGB component (18 bits total), so each of the 256 colors is chosen out of 2^18 = 262,144 colors, not 16 million.

And yet... https://int10h.org/blog/2015/04/cga-in-1024-colors-new-mode-... (this was resubmitted here a few days ago)

> CGA only had 4 ugly colors

16 colors, technically. But only four at a time, and three of those were selected from two preset palettes, both of which were hideous (one green/red/brown, one cyan/magenta/white).

And EGA had 64, because while its display output pins where still TTL, there was no longer a single intensity bit (RGBI) like in CGA but individual intensity bits wired for each color component (rRgGbB)

You nailed it with "4 ugly colors"[0]

I remember the palette choices in CGA were downright bizarre; they'd be 4 colors that you couldn't possibly use to make anything look right. At the price of the card and the display, you're like "wait ... that's it?"

[0] Ignoring all of the interesting things coming out of the 8088 demo scene, nothing that I'm aware of from the 80s was capable of anything close to that.

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