Comment by ok123456 | Hacker News Reader

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Comment by ok123456 | Hacker News Reader

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I remember the "generic" VGA driver having horrible default settings that resulted in 300x200 at 16 colors.

I just had a look at the install of ancient NetBSD I have running on my Pocket386, and the X server in there (which is XFree86 3.x) does have a generic VGA driver that does 640x480 at 16 colors just fine. I'm not sure what the "default settings" would be in this context since X that old doesn't even start without a proper XF86Config.

Old would mean mid-90s XFree86.

That's exactly what I'm talking about here, as well. NetBSD 1.2 is from 1996.

320x200 at 256 colors. X doesn't support any depth lower than 8bit, so VGA 640x480 wouldn't work.

I remember that Xfree86 allowed 1 bit (B&W) modes

X does, modern X apps may not.

X absolutely supports depths of 1 and 4 bits per pixel, along with 8bpp, with its VGA server: https://www.xfree86.org/4.8.0/vga.4.html

Thanks for the correction.

I hadn't thought of 1bpp because it isn't interesting on VGA hardware. But you're absolutely right about 4bpp having been a thing.

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