POV-Ray : Newsgroups : povray.off-topic : Tell me it isn't so! : Re: Tell me it isn't so! Server Time
10 Oct 2024 09:15:53 EDT (-0400)
  Re: Tell me it isn't so!  
From: clipka
Date: 27 Jul 2009 20:00:00
Message: <web.4a6e3eb5ac52dfd4842b7b550@news.povray.org>
Warp <war### [at] tagpovrayorg> wrote:
>   Immediately when you started having different users with different
> hardware setups, the whole graphics programming stumbled on a huge problem.

Yup. DOS times were even worse than nowadays, as there was no accepted standard
interface to graphics cards at all (except for standard CGA/EGA/VGA modes,
which later graphics cards tried their best to remain hardware compatible
with); so essentially each program came with its own proprietary set of
graphics drivers, which fully supported only a selection of SuperVGA graphics
cards available - and new graphics cards in turn would come with disks
providing graphics drivers for only the most popular graphics-hungry
applications.

High-quality graphics games in the VGA/SuperVGA era would almost invariably run
in the famous VGA mode 13h (320x200 pixels at 256 colors) anyway, which worked
fine on virtually all SuperVGA graphics cards, but didn't really max them out
of course.


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