When are VGA cards not EGA compatible – testing with Fantasyland #VintageComputing #Retrocomputing
In 1984, Joel Gould of IBM Cambridge (Massachusetts) Scientific Center wrote a demo program named FantasyLand. This demo was meant to show off the capabilities of IBM’s brand new Enhanced Graphics Adapter, or EGA. The demo was strictly a demo and was never sold.
Michal Necasek has attempted to run the FantasyLand demo on a number of VGA cards and in the end concluded that it cannot run properly. Even though the VGA is in general highly backwards compatible with the EGA, the FantasyLand demo exposes a couple of minor points where that’s not the case.
See an analysis of the tiny but important differences between EGA and VGA emulating EGA and one possible success in the blog post here.
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