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I'm not sure why the image's horizontal position seemed far to the left - this occurred in a few games with UniCGA.īattle Chess worked well too (also using the -s option for UniCGA). You have to run the game using vball c to request CGA mode, otherwise it just dumps you back at the DOS prompt. Kings of the Beach worked just fine with UniCGA's -s option. Railroad Tycoon wasn't fooled by UniCGA, and aborted with the message 'CGA is not supported on your machine'. WARNING : You can damage your computer monitor by setting the refresh rate higher than it can support! I accept no liability for loss or damage if you use this tool.

DOS CARD GAME SIMULATOR SOFTWARE

It supports not only software simulation, but hardware simulation too (for cards that have 'some' support for CGA), you can adjust the refresh rate yourself and it supports all CGA graphics and text modes. UniCGA by Tommy Frandsen is unique among the CGA simulators being reviewed here in that it is *very* full-featured. I'm honestly not sure if we'll get any difference, but it makes this testing more thorough. XT CF-Lite with 512 MB SanDisk Ultra CompactFlash card partitioned into four 2 GB FAT-16 partitions.Īs you can see from the test bed above, for a little bit of variety I chose to do the tests using two Hercules-compatible graphics cards from different manufacturers, and with different memory speeds. Philips BM7513 12' Green-screen monochrome. Kouwell KW-526K (Tamarack TD3088A) Hercules-compatible 8-bit ISA card with 64 KB 100ns DRAM video memory G5 Hercules-compatible 8-bit ISA card with 64 KB 120ns DRAM video memory Zeta P-10, NEC V20 9.54 MHz, 640 KB RAM, Faraday FE2010A chipset.

DOS CARD GAME SIMULATOR PC

To test these various 1980s and early 1990s DOS utilities, I have the following retro PC hardware set up: Motherboard Note also that in real life (off-camera), the image quality is much better than what you see in these pictures! Where text seems to just blend in with the background in these images, it is very readable in real life.

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On the plus side, these various utilities sometimes display CGA in very different sized resolutions, so seeing my monitor's bezel around the edges will hopefully help you determine what you will actually see! Please forgive the crude photos - I usually use a DOS screen grabber called Snarf-It, but it fails to work with my Hercules card. HGCIBM v2.02 - Athena Digital, Gary Batson (1987).HGCIBM v1.11 - Athena Digital, Gary Batson (1986).CGA - Colour Graphics Emulator by Stephen Jones ().This article looks at the following CGA simulators and reviews their good and bad points when used with 18 games that do not support Hercules but do support CGA: Examples of this are Railroad Tycoon, Indianapolis 500 and Boulder Dash. Some games would directly try to write to and read from the CGA graphics memory location which doesn't exist on a Hercules card, so these titles would either exit you out to DOS with a friendly message, or crash.

So CGA simulators, basically small DOS utilities, were written to overcome this, allowing the many HGC owners out there to still buy and play CGA-compatible software. If you grew up with an Amstrad CPC464 and your parents only got the monochrome (green) monitor option or you had an Amstrad PCW Word Processor, you'll be right at home here -) Typically these would be 4 colours at 640x200 or 320x200 resolution. It supports only 2 brightness levels and blinking, so all graphics needed to be dithered to try to show different shades.īecause of this, and despite its very low resolution, CGA was about the lowest quality standard games developers wrote their games to support. But this excellent high resolution had a trade off - colour (or lack of).

This was important, as the Hercules (HGC) graphics standard was really designed for high readability in text mode with its 720x348 resolution.

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CGA Simulators for Hercules Cards What is a CGA Simulator?Ī CGA Simulator was a program you ran that allowed you to run CGA games, that is, games that were designed to be playable with an IBM Color Graphics Adapter, even if you only had a Hercules monochrome graphics card.

Dos card game simulator