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Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by sspiff on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:26AM (#11960667)
VGA was 640x480, not 320x200. 320x200 didn't have an acronym I can recall. SVGA was 800x600.
Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by joakleaf on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:31AM (#11960703)
256 color VGA mode 13h was certainly 320x200.

I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions.

The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode.

640x480 was 16 color.

Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels.

SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.

Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by rangibaby on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:37AM (#11960729)
Time for some HN-worthy pedantry. I distinctly remember reading in DOS for Dummies that VGA stood for Video Graphics Array. Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system.
Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by joakleaf on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:44AM (#11960755)
Yes, sorry... You are absolutely right!

I've always mixed up "Array" and "Adapter" for VGA, as EGA stood for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and CGA was Color Graphics Adapter.

Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by a1k0n on Thursday June 23, 2016 @09:58AM (#11960852)
320x200x256 colors was referred to as MCGA, but nobody actually had an an MCGA card.
Re:Happy 20th Birthday, Quake by dragonwriter on Thursday June 23, 2016 @11:02AM (#11961455)
Anyone who had a PS/2 Model 25 or 30 did, but those weren't exactly popular, and MCGA was a weird duck (supporting the 256 color 320x200 mode, and a 640x480 monochrome mode, but not the 320x200x16 EGA mode -- which VGA supported -- which made it not a compatible upgrade from EGA and unable to run lots of EGA software. If it had been EGA compatible, it might have seen more use, even though VGA was better and introduced at the same time.)