tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993165553021868648.post5289605701154480060..comments2024-03-27T05:39:24.505-04:00Comments on Nerdly Pleasures: Pleasant Suprises : The Epson MGA Q205AGreat Hierophanthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04409413307024477304noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6993165553021868648.post-23393549778881711652019-07-04T22:06:58.758-04:002019-07-04T22:06:58.758-04:00Historical note: "MGA" was a common shor...Historical note: "MGA" was a common shorthand for Hercules-a-like cards, as distinguished from the text-only MDA and colour CGA. And there's very little to a Herc card beyond an MDA clone with 16x as much memory and the ability to interpret the contents as a(n even more weirdly interleaved than CGA) bitmap instead of a character + attribute map. Even loading alternate character sets had to wait until the Herc Plus (so any textmode beyond 80x25 had to be emulated using graphics, without high-intensity attributing), and the card didn't even have a BIOS of its own as it just reused the MDA one built-in to the PC itself. Hence there were rapidly a huge number of glitch-perfect clones, most with extra features such as being CGA (or indeed Plantronics) compatible or even offering 25kHz super-CGA modes...tahreyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17418399406434993227noreply@blogger.com