Retro Review: FIDA CGA Card

4th July 2022

In Part 2 we repaired these two old CGA cards and double-checked their output using the excellent CGA Compatibility Tester.

Now we can play some games!

 

 

Grand Prix Circuit

Accolade's fun racer from 1988 would run in Hercules, CGA or EGA modes. The CGA option ran in Mode 04h (320 x 200 in 4 colours), using the third palette which was unofficial. This provided the four colours of black (#000000), cyan (#00aaaa), red (#aa0000), and light grey (#aaaaaa).

           

Interestingly, when running the game using a more modern VGA card (in this case, a Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428 VESA Local Bus one) and captured direct to my PC, it uses palette 1 instead, which is the black (#000000), purple (#ff55ff#, cyan (#55ffff) and white (#ffffff). I guess this is part of the CGA emulation that's inaccurate on certain VGA cards.

 

Battletech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception

The DOS version of the tabletop war game was written by Westwood Studios and published by Infocom in 1988. CGA was its lowest graphical mode, also offering EGA and MCGA/VGA. The CGA option ran in Mode 04h (320 x 200 in 4 colours), using palette 0 with the four colours of black (#000000), green (#55ff55), light-red (#ff5555), and yellow (#555555).

           

Hillsfar

One of the first role-playing games for DOS, Hillsfar was written by Westwood Associates and published by Strategic Simulations, Inc. in 1989. Graphics options were CGA or EGA. The CGA option ran in Mode 04h (320 x 200 in 4 colours), using palette 0 with the four colours of black (#000000), green (#55ff55), light-red (#ff5555), and yellow (#555555).