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HoloDust on 28 February 2024
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Bofferbrauer2 said:
HoloDust said:

VGA was 640x480. SVGA is 800x600. Which is quite a difference from resolutions of consoles in those days (320x224 at best).

VGA was UP TO 640x480, and then only in 16 colors. If you wanted 256 colors, you had to go down to 320x200 or 320x240

SVGA, or Super Video Graphics Array for long, or simply Super VGA, is called like this because it's supposed to remove the resolution restriction of VGA, so 256 colors could be used with bigger resolutions. They also standardized the resolutions 1024x768 and 1280x1024. SVGA is used as shorthand for 800x600 because VGA standardized reolution only went to the aforementioned 640x480, and 800x600 is the next-higher resolution.

As most SVGA graphics cards were just slightly modified VGA GPUs with more VRAM, since the lack thereof was the main reason why you had to choose between high resolution or high color depth basically since CGA (CGA had monochrome 640x200, 4-color 320x200 and an undocumented 16-color 160x100 text mode; EGA had 4-color 640x200 and 16-color 320x200, plus 640x350 16-color on special enhanced EGA monitors, and a 720x350 monochrome mode. Some manufacurers made made also cards that could do higher resolutions up to 800x560 and called them Super EGA, which was incidentally where the Super VGA name later comes from). Since SVGA wasn't as standardized unlike it's predecessors, actually not all early SVGA GPUs could do 800x600.

Bolded: Not true. It's not because the Neo Geo is considered the most capable console that it also had the highest resolution, plus it had a higher resolution mode at 384x264. The TurboGrafx 16 could do 565x242 in 1987 with 482 colors out of a palette of 512 colors, the SNES 512x478 (interlaced). Heck, even the handheld PC Engine GT could do 400x270 in 1990 with the same 482 colors as the TurboGrafx it is based upon. 

Yeah, up to 640x480...for me that was what VGA meant back then, whenever I used SVGA it was always for 800x600. I don't remember ever using SVGA term for 1024 - was it XGA or something like that? - never used that one either, it was just 1024.

I don't think many games on consoles ever used those higher resolutions and honestly, not aware of any NeoGeo game that goes over 320x224, nor even that NeoGeo is capable of doing so.