How the Hercules Graphics Card Worked

Comments · 1.5K

• TW

  @twiggypie2314 · 11 months ago

  &quot;No Games&quot;<br><br>My Brother, MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR IS RIGHT THERE!

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• NO

  @Nolano386 · 11 months ago

  Glad you&apos;re still making &quot;How &lt;blank&gt; works&quot; videos. I still show people your &quot;How Old School Graphics worked&quot; videos as a gateway to a better understanding of displays and computers in general.

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• RO

  @rodmunch69 · 11 months ago

  And people complain about the length of today&apos;s video cards.

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• JA

  @Jay-je8fc · 11 months ago

  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&apos;s how Hercules Card was born.

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• VA

  @valdenv · 11 months ago

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

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• ST

  @StephenSpencer1972 · 11 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hblpFQ2ObCg&amp;t=46">0:46</a> monochrome phosphorous displays were much easier on the eyes, too

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• TE

  @TechTimeTraveller · 11 months ago (edited)

  The first card I had in the first PC of my own was a Herc. &nbsp;Orange (amber) everything wasn&apos;t great but I was just grateful to have a PC of my own. &nbsp;Then one Xmas my grandmother bought another Herc card for me, this time a VGA. &nbsp;That thing was longer than a freight train, and unfortunately she didn&apos;t realize it needed a different monitor. &nbsp;Had to wait months just staring at the box before finally experiencing color VGA.

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• BI

  @bitwize · 11 months ago

  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.<br><br>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.

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• PI

  @PioNunes · 11 months ago

  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.

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• JO

  @john_ace · 11 months ago

  Hi Dave, sorry but i have to mention the following:<br>I suspect that the first &quot;Hercules graphics card&quot; <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hblpFQ2ObCg&amp;t=252">4:12</a> is actually a MDA card clone that was put in the HGC box after an upgrade.<br><br>MDA-card:<br>8x 2114 =4kbytes (each 2114 has 1024x4 bits)<br><br>&quot;Mitsubishi&quot; MDA-card:<br>2x HM6116 =4kbytes (each 6116 has 2048x8 bits)<br><br>The original HGC has 64kbytes of memory (DRAM) which allows 2 screen pages of pixel-graphics.

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• MA

  @marcodebruin5370 · 11 months ago

  Oh boy, that bring back some memories. After using my C-64 for many years. I &quot;upgraded&quot; to an XT-clone (NEC V30 CPU) with 20MB (yes &quot;Mega&quot;!) 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).

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• DU

  @durfkludge · 11 months ago

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

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