Hercules Graphics Card
Hercules Graphics Card ( HGC ) is a 1982 computer graphics card developed by the U.S. company Hercules, which was by their popularity to another ad in addition to the standard IBM - standard MDA, CGA and EGA later. The Company's brand names are Hercules Corporation since 1999 owned by the Guillemot.
It was very common in the mid-1980s and supported text and graphics with 720 × 348 pixels with 1 bit per pixel. In text mode it was at the MDA standard compatible and supported two intensity levels for the character representation. The graphics mode is not supported by the BIOS " IBM-compatible " computers, forcing the development of tricky detection routines. The HGC was designed to operate at TTL monochrome monitors that were mostly equipped with green, amber and later increasingly white ( " white paper " ) phosphors. Responsible for the entire presentation is a chip called 6845 by Motorola. This chip is generated using the necessary peripheral components TTL signal, which passed to the monitor.
The company also produced the HRF Hercules card (Hercules RamFont ), also known as Hercules Graphics Card Plus ( HGC ) known. Thus, up to 3072 user-defined characters could be stored in RAM in text mode could be accessed in portions to 256 pieces. There was an additional chip 112 GB for the management of possibly in RAM character set on this card.
The old IBM standards have been around since 1990 completely replaced by the VGA card.
The Hercules card was also used later like, to connect two monitors to a PC because the graphics side base address was B0000hex, unlike A0000hex at CGA to VGA graphics cards. Therefore, the card could be operated simultaneously, for example, with an EGA or VGA graphics card or served as a base map for systems that were equipped with TIGA graphics accelerators. Some programs recognized the graphics card and use it to issue additional information, for example in the area of CAD or for debugging.
The company Hercules later also produced color graphics cards, for example, the HCC (Hercules Color Card, an EGA -clone ) and the HIC (Hercules InColor Card, color version of the HRF card works similar to the EGA card ). It was purchased by Guillemot Corporation 1999.