Enhanced Graphics Adapter

An Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) is a piece of hardware developed by IBM and sold in 1984, which gave IBM personal computers graphics capabilities superior to IBM's the previous graphics adapter the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA). In 1987, it was superseded by the Video Graphics Array (VGA), although software continued to support it for years to follow.

EGA supports four graphics modes and four text modes. It's best graphic resolution is 640x350 at 4-bit color (16 distinct colors at once, chosen from a palette of 60 colors), but most programs which supported EGA used its more primitive 320x200 resolution and didn't change from the default color palette. The display type was extremely popular for DOS programs through the mid to late 1980s.

I spent a lot of my childhood acquainted with EGA graphics, not just because a lot of games I played used it, but because it was a very popular QuickBASIC screen (screen 7). Even though I haven't bothered with it in decades, I still have the default EGA color palette memorized.

Games

All games that used 4-bit Color

These are games that I think made good use of EGA graphics:

• Commander Keen IV: Secret of the Oracle
• King's Quest III: To Heir Is Human
• King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
• Loom
• The Secret of Monkey Island
• SimAnt
• Space Quest I: The Sarien Encounter
• Space Quest II: Volhaul's Revenge

Documentation

• 

  Technical manual.

Links

• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Graphics_Adapter - Wikipedia.
• shikadi.net/moddingwiki/Raw_EGA_data - Modding Wiki graphic details.