Hacker News Reader

The early VGA chipsets were very slow. They also didn't have any of the sprite & tile features that Amigas had.

On a generic 286 you could swap out the stock ISA VGA video card for a Diamond SpeedStar and the improvement was crazy.

That was still true with VLB(VESA Local Bus) and later revisions of the Tseng ET4000 chipset. Which was what made the SpeedStars fly. (At 50Mhz! Harr!)

carmack and friends getting sprites to work on DOS machines was a technical feat. I think they used it for commander keen.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com