Did EGA Save PC Gaming?

That's the thesis of a recent article*, anyway. I'm not sure I agree
with it but it's a good excuse for a ramble about old-timey games and
hardware.

Not that I need much an excuse to do that.

I honestly can't remember if my first PC (IBM/PC compatible for you
nitpickers ;-) came with an EGA card. Back then, I didn't know EGA
from VGA from whatever that weird bastardization of color and
monochrome mode the Apple II used. My second PC -which I acquired a
year later- was definitely VGA.

Not that I found EGA so troublesome. There were a lot of good games in
EGA. The original "Duke Nukem" was EGA. "Ultima V" was EGA. The first
"Mechwarrior" game was EGA. "Pool of Radiance" was EGA. You could do a
lot with just 16 colors.

("Syndicate" -at least its gameplay mode - was only 16-colors; didja
know that? It wasn't EGA, though -it used a higher-resolution VGA
mode- but it just goes to show you that it color depth didn't
necessarily restrict you from creating good-looking visuals.
"Lemmings", too, used only 16 colors.)

So CGA was a definite eyesore, but it wasn't a deal breaker. Besides,
with some tricks, even CGA was bearable. Only a few games used it, but
the CGA composite mode gave the IBM/PC games sixteen (slightly blurry)
colors to work with. (The best example of this was Sierra Online's
"Mickey's Space Adventures", where the difference between the two is
dramatically obvious. See it here: https://imgur.com/a/SaesMin . Same
game, same code, just different monitor output.)

So I'm not so sure EGA was really the life-saver the article claims.
The only reason composite CGA didn't take off more than it did, I
think, is because EGA replaced it relatively quickly.

Far more important to me was upgrades to the PC sounds. Barely
tolerable (and on the low-end on what was used by its competitors) in
1981, by the late 80s the PC beeper was extremely behind the times. I
could endure the blue-and-magenta eyesores of CGA visuals, but the
squealing of the PC Beeper was an immediate turn-off. It made games
unplayable.

(In fairness, you could do some impressive things with the PC beeper
too, from playing recognizable music to digitized speech. It was
always scratchy but not always an ear-bleed. However, it was so
computationally intensive that few games used those techniques).

But it was the advent of dedicated sound-processing cards -the Ad Lib,
the Sound Blaster - or if you were rich, the Roland MT32! - that made
games on the PC competitive again. Or at least a hobby I was
interested in playing around with. CGA was bilious, but that beeper
made me embarrassed to game on a PC.

Still, the article does bring up some amusing points; in particular,
the cost of an EGA card. The most basic model would set you back $500
USD, and you'd need to buy a compatible monitor to go with it. A
high-end EGA card and monitor would cost you the equivalent of more
than $5000 USD in 2024 money.

That's about the equivalent of buying three GeForce RTX 4090s! And all
you got out of the deal was 16-colors! High-end PC gaming was _always_
a rich-man's folly!

Anyway, by the late 1980s -definitely by 1991- I had upgraded to VGA,
and all these issues were moot. Actually, by then I may already have
had an SVGA card, although I doubt any program I had took advantage of
that capability. Still, 256 colors felt excessively grandiose, and
nobody had a PC that could push more than 640x480 pixels anyway. There
were a lot of great games in EGA, but most of my favorite games were
VGA, and I'll always have a soft spot for that mode.

Anyway, I've run out of things to say so I think I'll just trail off
here...









* Congratulations! You knew to look here for the URL to the article!
https://www.pcgamesn.com/pc-retro-tech/ega-graphics