"No Games"

My Brother, MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR IS RIGHT THERE!

Glad you're still making "How <blank> works" videos. I still show people your "How Old School Graphics worked" videos as a gateway to a better understanding of displays and computers in general.

Van, one of the Hercules founder, was a PhD student at the time. He found that existing MDA monitor was pratically garbage to display complex letter like Thai alphabet. His solution was to come up with his own graphic card design. And that's how Hercules Card was born.

Hercules graphics on an amber screen was great. I was given a whole bunch of faulty hercules cards when I started work at a company in 1988, just to evaluate my repair skills, used a couple of test programs written in C. I fixed most of them, great fun, almost all the components were available of the shelf.

I'm so used to having used computers just simply having Hercs already installed, I never even considered how they looked in a retail box.

I find it interesting how different the computing needs in Asia were, simply due to their character sets. For example, Japanese computers needed to display kanji, hiragana, and katakana crisply, so there were entirely different PC standards (mainly the NEC PC-88 and PC-98) that the Japanese preferred to IBM PCs.

Van Suwannukul, the creator of the Hercules graphics card, was from Thailand. He designed it so that he could type his doctoral thesis in Thai. So PC users in the west benefited from this phenomenon also, and the strength of the PC ecosystem was such that if you needed a custom graphics card, you could just build one, it would work, and you could bring it to market if you wanted.

The first card I had in the first PC of my own was a Herc.  Orange (amber) everything wasn't great but I was just grateful to have a PC of my own.  Then one Xmas my grandmother bought another Herc card for me, this time a VGA.  That thing was longer than a freight train, and unfortunately she didn't realize it needed a different monitor.  Had to wait months just staring at the box before finally experiencing color VGA.

0:46 monochrome phosphorous displays were much easier on the eyes, too

Woot woot, love a new 8-bit video!

Oh boy, that bring back some memories. After using my C-64 for many years. I "upgraded" to an XT-clone (NEC V30 CPU) with 20MB (yes "Mega"!) HDD and Hercules card. At one point upgraded to a new Mobo with 486+487, but kept the Hercules and HDD. Used that PC all through uni and early career and did a lot of software development on it (Basic, Pascal, C, C++, Assembly).

And people complain about the length of today's video cards.

Hi Dave, sorry but i have to mention the following:
I suspect that the first "Hercules graphics card" 4:12 is actually a MDA card clone that was put in the HGC box after an upgrade.

MDA-card:
8x 2114 =4kbytes (each 2114 has 1024x4 bits)

"Mitsubishi" MDA-card:
2x HM6116 =4kbytes (each 6116 has 2048x8 bits)

The original HGC has 64kbytes of memory (DRAM) which allows 2 screen pages of pixel-graphics.

Perfect Timing Dave, I needed a quality retro video to watch!👍🏻

Big fan of all the bodge wires on the original Herc. Love a good bodge-job. Respect the bodge.

It was hilarious back then with how IBM never figured out through nearly the entire 1980s that people played games and there may actually be a GUI at some point.

Around 1990 in Poland my friend's father, a military engineer, had at home a 286 with harddisk and Hercules - it was a big thing as we 10yr kids, at best had 8bit Ataris - Hercules monochrome high resolution graphics even with the bars looked so much serious and highend - all games looked so mature, like from another universe. No future computer looked so advanced and serious as this with Hercules.

Hah! As the author of Alpha Waves (aka Continuum in the US), and a regular follower of this channel (just noticed I was not subscribed, fixed), I was jazzed to see you show it as the first example of a game that supports Hercules.

There is a backstory to this: the game was originally developed on an Atari Stacy, the portable version of the Atari ST, which had a built-in monochrome display. So I would write the code from my student dorm on the Stacy, then test it in color on my parents TV during the holidays. As a result, Infogrames knew it could run well in black and white.

The porting to the PC was done by none other than Frederick Raynal, of "Alone in the Dark" fame. As a matter of fact, Alpha Waves is where Frederick learned how to do 3D graphics. Applying that to the horror genre is something that would never have occurred to me, but then Frederick was another class of game designer.

These kinds of 8-Bit Guy videos are so satisfying to watch.

The dual monitor debugging screen thing was used in Command & Conquer (1995). It apparently had an entire separate screen output that could display on-the-fly debug info while the game ran, and all of that code was released a couple of years ago. Really interesting to see why that was possible!

About the parallel port on the cards: Back in those days they needed a parallel port for a hardware lock, for excample for Autocad. A "Sentinel" lock which you needed to run the software. So the "pro"-graphic cards had also a parallelport for that lock.